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

Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling

Poet B

Thomas Babington Macaulay Thomas Babington Macaulay
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 67% Poems 81% Blended 74%
Swap sides Another related pair
Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936 (~71)
17 live poems · English

Rudyard Kipling was born Joseph Rudyard Kipling on December 30, 1865, in the bustling colonial port of Bombay, British India, a city that would forever pulse through his veins like the monsoon rains and the clamor of its streets. He died on January 18, 1936, in London, England, at the age of seventy, his body laid to rest in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey after a life that spanned the height of the British Empire…

“When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Longing
Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay

25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859 (~59)
2 live poems · English

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born on 25 October 1800 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire and died on 28 December 1859 at Kensington, London. He was at once a poet, essayist, parliamentarian, colonial administrator, historian, reviewer, and one of the most commanding prose stylists in nineteenth-century English. To modern readers his name often summons the grand certainty of Victorian “Whig history,” the tendency to…

“I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

Rudyard Kipling
Thomas Babington Macaulay
1800 1936
Their lives did not overlap. 6 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 7,266 km separate Mumbai, Maharashtra, India from Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

india

Rudyard Kipling: bombay, westminster abbey, the jungle book, just so stories, kim, gunga din, the light that failed, caroline balestier. Thomas Babington Macaulay: rothley temple, leicestershire, edinburgh review, lays of ancient rome, whig history, trinity college, chancellor’s gold medal, john milton.

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.

The Last of the Light Brigade
Rudyard Kipling
77%
Compare
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
The Widow at Windsor
Rudyard Kipling
74%
Compare
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Gentlemen-Rankers
Rudyard Kipling
74% lost
Compare
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
The Explanation
Rudyard Kipling
73%
Compare
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Tommy
Rudyard Kipling
73%
Compare
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Christmas in India
Rudyard Kipling
72% exile
Compare
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Rudyard Kipling: Irony, Sorrow, Longing. Thomas Babington Macaulay: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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