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.

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

Clement Clarke Moore Clement Clarke Moore

Poet B

William Brighty Rands William Brighty Rands
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 66% Poems 78% Blended 71%
Swap sides Another related pair
Clement Clarke Moore

Clement Clarke Moore

15 July 1779 – 10 July 1863 (~84)
2 live poems · English

Clement Clarke Moore was born in New York City on 15 July 1779, into a family whose standing joined religious authority, learning, landholding, and old New York connections. He died on 10 July 1863, five days before his eighty-fourth birthday, having become a respected scholar, educator, churchman, landowner, and local civic figure. Yet history has remembered him overwhelmingly for a poem of fifty-six lines: “A Visit…

“In spite of all the cares and sorrows of this life, he thinks we are so constituted that a good honest hearty laugh, which conceals no malice, and is excited by nothing corrupt, however ungenteel it may be, is healthful both to body and mind.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Joy, Tenderness
William Brighty Rands

William Brighty Rands

24 December 1823 – 23 April 1882 (~59)
2 live poems · English

William Brighty Rands was born on 24 December 1823, in Chelsea, then a district on the western edge of London and already a place where commerce, domestic life, artistic ambition, and metropolitan poverty met in close quarters. He died on 23 April 1882, having lived only fifty-eight years, and his name is now far less familiar than the names of several Victorian writers whose work has dated more severely. Yet Rands o…

“But the day is yet far off when the historian shall jostle the novelist out of his place.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Light Verse Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Irony

In time

Clement Clarke Moore
William Brighty Rands
1779 1882
They overlapped for 41 years (1823–1863). When William Brighty Rands was born, Clement Clarke Moore was about 44. William Brighty Rands was about 40 when Clement Clarke Moore died.

On the map

About 5,568 km separate New York City, New York, USA from Chelsea, London, England. 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

chelsea

Clement Clarke Moore: new york city, a visit from st. nicholas, the night before christmas, benjamin moore, charity clarke moore, columbia college, general theological seminary, catharine elizabeth taylor. William Brighty Rands: chelsea, victorian children's literature, lilliput levee, matthew browne, lilliput lectures, court of chancery, industrial revolution, legal writing.

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.

Written After a Snow-Storm
Clement Clarke Moore
75% children, beauty, world
Compare
The Flowers
William Brighty Rands
Written After a Snow-Storm
Clement Clarke Moore
69%
Compare
I am the cat of cats
William Brighty Rands
A Visit from St. Nicholas
Clement Clarke Moore
62%
Compare
I am the cat of cats
William Brighty Rands
A Visit from St. Nicholas
Clement Clarke Moore
62%
Compare
The Flowers
William Brighty Rands

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Clement Clarke Moore: Wonder, Joy, Tenderness. William Brighty Rands: Joy, Wonder, Irony.

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