A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard



Compare Poets

Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.

Poet A

Rabindranath Tagore Rabindranath Tagore

Poet B

John Boyle O'Reilly John Boyle O'Reilly
Compare two related contemporaries

A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 54% Poems 87% Blended 69%
Swap sides Another related pair
Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941 (~80)
3 live poems · English

Rabindranath Tagore, born on 7 May 1861 in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India, and dead on 7 August 1941 in the same city, was one of the rare writers whose life seems inseparable from the cultural history of a nation. Yet to call him merely India’s greatest modern poet is to reduce an astonishingly various career. He was a lyric poet, songwriter, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, letter wri…

“Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Poet-Musicians, Political Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder
John Boyle O'Reilly

John Boyle O'Reilly

28 June 1844 – 10 August 1890 (~46)
12 live poems · English

On a June morning in 1844, at Dowth Castle near the banks of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, a boy was born into a world of contradictions—a world of ancient Celtic splendour and modern British subjugation, of rich oral tradition and stony colonial reality. That boy, John Boyle O'Reilly, would grow to embody those contradictions more fully than perhaps any Irish-American figure of the nineteenth century: so…

“A vote, like a law, is no good unless there is an arm behind it; it cannot be enforced. This is a shameful truth, perhaps, but it is true.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Irish Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow

In time

Rabindranath Tagore
John Boyle O'Reilly
1844 1941
They overlapped for 30 years (1861–1890). When Rabindranath Tagore was born, John Boyle O'Reilly was about 17. Rabindranath Tagore was about 29 when John Boyle O'Reilly died.

On the map

About 8,309 km separate Kolkata, India from Dowth, County Meath, Ireland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

Shared

From the biographies

Rabindranath Tagore: calcutta, bengal presidency, gurudev, debendranath tagore, mrinalini devi, santiniketan, manasi, sonar tari. John Boyle O'Reilly: county meath, dowth castle, irish republican brotherhood, fenian movement, tenth hussars, boston pilot, father patrick mccabe, captain david r..

Poems that secretly rhyme

The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.

In Desperate Hope
Rabindranath Tagore
77% life, world
Compare
An Old Picture
John Boyle O'Reilly
In Desperate Hope
Rabindranath Tagore
77% life, hope
Compare
Yesterday and To-Morrow
John Boyle O'Reilly
The Sailor
Rabindranath Tagore
76% world
Compare
The Cry of the Dreamer
John Boyle O'Reilly
The Sailor
Rabindranath Tagore
76% world
Compare
An Old Picture
John Boyle O'Reilly
Let Me Not Forget
Rabindranath Tagore
76% life
Compare
Yesterday and To-Morrow
John Boyle O'Reilly
Let Me Not Forget
Rabindranath Tagore
75% life, world
Compare
Love, and be Wise
John Boyle O'Reilly

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Rabindranath Tagore: Longing, Spirituality, Wonder. John Boyle O'Reilly: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow.

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