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

Edward Rowland Sill Edward Rowland Sill

Poet B

Max Ehrmann Max Ehrmann
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.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 73% Poems 83% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Edward Rowland Sill

Edward Rowland Sill

29 April 1841 – 27 February 1887 (~46)
2 live poems · English

Edward Rowland Sill was born on 29 April 1841 in Windsor, Connecticut, and died on 27 February 1887 in Cleveland, Ohio. His life was short, frequently unsettled, and shadowed by poor health, yet it produced a body of poetry and prose distinguished by moral seriousness, intellectual candor, and an unusual tenderness toward ordinary human weakness. He belonged to the generation of American writers who came after the fi…

“I more and more believe the only way for ordinary mortals is to keep out of sight, and write anonymously.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality
Listen Timeline Affinities
Max Ehrmann

Max Ehrmann

26 September 1872 – 9 September 1945 (~73)
2 live poems · English

Max Ehrmann was born on 26 September 1872 in Terre Haute, Indiana, and died there on 9 September 1945, seventeen days before his seventy-third birthday. He is remembered almost everywhere as the author of “Desiderata,” the compact prose poem beginning, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste,” but that single work represents only the most widely circulated part of a long, earnest, and sometimes overlooked literary life…

“I am not making a book that will live or a book that will die. I have no thought whether it will live or die. I am for my own sake manifesting myself, looking at myself, encouraging and criticising myself.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Mystical & Spiritual Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Edward Rowland Sill
Max Ehrmann
1841 1945
They overlapped for 16 years (1872–1887). When Max Ehrmann was born, Edward Rowland Sill was about 31. Max Ehrmann was about 15 when Edward Rowland Sill died.
Edward Rowland Sill in history Max Ehrmann in history Years they were given

On the map

About 1,272 km separate Windsor, Connecticut, USA from Terre Haute, Indiana, USA. Shared ground: United States.

Edward Rowland Sill

Max Ehrmann

Open both on the History Atlas

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

life self

Edward Rowland Sill only

sword power king courage broken friend honey clouds

Max Ehrmann only

desiderata existence wisdom advice nature peace world love social afraid

From the biographies

Edward Rowland Sill: windsor, connecticut, cleveland, ohio, the hermitage and other poems, the venus of milo and other poems, harvard divinity school, mary b. sill, university of california, transcendentalism. Max Ehrmann: terre haute, desiderata, bertha pratt king, depaul university, harvard university, delta tau delta, a fearsome riddle, the wife of marobius.

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.

Living
Edward Rowland Sill
75% self
Compare
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann
Living
Edward Rowland Sill
70% life
Compare
Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
Opportunity
Edward Rowland Sill
69%
Compare
Desiderata
Max Ehrmann
Opportunity
Edward Rowland Sill
68%
Compare
I Sit Afraid
Max Ehrmann

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1873 Maxwell publishes Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in Cambridge
1873 Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' Composition
1876 1876-78 Super El Niño Causes Worldwide Famines
1876 Gerard Manley Hopkins composes his major poems
1879 Edison Demonstrates the Carbon-Filament Incandescent Lamp
1882 Nietzsche Declares 'God is Dead'
1882 Robert Koch Discovers the Tuberculosis Bacillus
1883 Publication of 'Treasure Island'

Edward Rowland Sill

1844 Relocation to Cuyahoga Falls
1859 Education at Yale College
1867 First Published Poem
1870 Marriage to Mary E. Sill
1876 Teaching Career at the University of California
1882 Publication of 'The Poems of Edward Rowland Sill'
1886 Illness and Declining Health
1888 Final Poems Published Posthumously

Max Ehrmann

1894 Graduation from DePauw University
1896 Admission to the Indiana Bar
1903 Marriage to Sara D. McCulloch
1927 Publication of 'Desiderata'
1931 Relocation to California
1935 Friendship with poet James Whitcomb Riley
1940 Publication of 'The Book of Life'
1960 Posthumous recognition of 'Desiderata'

Emotional landscapes

Edward Rowland Sill: Wonder, Peace, Spirituality. Max Ehrmann: Tenderness, Spirituality, Peace.

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