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

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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 83% Blended 73%
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…

“A man who goes into life without a certain acquaintance with the classics and the value of words is as heavily handicapped as a man who takes up sports without knowing what has been done before.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Longing
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834 (~62)
26 live poems · English

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in Ottery St Mary, Devon, and died on 25 July 1834 at Highgate, near London. He occupies an unusual and commanding place in English literary history: he was at once one of the makers of Romantic poetry, a revolutionary critic of Shakespeare and poetic language, a philosophical mediator between German idealism and English thought, a political journalist, a religious…

“Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing

In time

Rudyard Kipling
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772 1936
Their lives did not overlap. 31 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 7,413 km separate Mumbai, Maharashtra, India from Ottery St. Mary, Devon, England. Both have ground in London.

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

Rudyard Kipling: bombay, westminster abbey, the jungle book, just so stories, kim, gunga din, the light that failed, caroline balestier. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ottery st mary, highgate, the rime of the ancient mariner, kubla khan, christabel, biographia literaria, william wordsworth, charles lamb.

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.

If-
Rudyard Kipling
76% self, life
Compare
Human Life
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
An Astrologer's Song
Rudyard Kipling
74%
Compare
Human Life
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Gentlemen-Rankers
Rudyard Kipling
74%
Compare
Addressed to a Young Man of Fortune
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
If-
Rudyard Kipling
74%
Compare
Addressed to a Young Man of Fortune
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Explanation
Rudyard Kipling
74% life
Compare
Human Life
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Widow at Windsor
Rudyard Kipling
73%
Compare
Addressed to a Young Man of Fortune
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Rudyard Kipling: Irony, Sorrow, Longing. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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