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

George Reginald Margetson George Reginald Margetson
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% Blended 66%
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…

“There is for you nothing irremediable, nothing ineffaceable, nothing irrevocable in anything you may have said or thought or done.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Longing
George Reginald Margetson

George Reginald Margetson

1877 – c. 1952 (~75)
1 live poem · English

George Reginald Margetson was a poet whose life and work embodied the quiet heroism of the immigrant dreamer, the working-class visionary who carved verses from the clang of machinery and the weight of family responsibilities. Born in the sun-drenched hills of St. Kitts in the British West Indies and later transplanted to the industrial bustle of early twentieth-century Boston, Margetson (1877–c.1952) produced a body…

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Hymn Writers, Mystical & Spiritual Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Spirituality, Sorrow

In time

Rudyard Kipling
George Reginald Margetson
1865 1952
They overlapped for 60 years (1877–1936). When George Reginald Margetson was born, Rudyard Kipling was about 12. George Reginald Margetson was about 59 when Rudyard Kipling died.

On the map

About 13,702 km separate Mumbai, Maharashtra, India from St. Kitts, British West Indies. 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

colonial

Rudyard Kipling: bombay, westminster abbey, the jungle book, just so stories, kim, gunga din, the light that failed, caroline balestier. George Reginald Margetson: st. kitts, boston, elizabeth matthews, claude mckay, langston hughes, england in the west indies, ethiopia's flight, songs of life.

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 Liner, She’s a Lady
Rudyard Kipling
74%
Compare
What Have I to Sorrow O'er?
George Reginald Margetson
The Last of the Light Brigade
Rudyard Kipling
74%
Compare
What Have I to Sorrow O'er?
George Reginald Margetson
An Astrologer's Song
Rudyard Kipling
73%
Compare
What Have I to Sorrow O'er?
George Reginald Margetson
Christmas in India
Rudyard Kipling
71%
Compare
What Have I to Sorrow O'er?
George Reginald Margetson
Gentlemen-Rankers
Rudyard Kipling
71%
Compare
What Have I to Sorrow O'er?
George Reginald Margetson
Troopin'
Rudyard Kipling
71%
Compare
What Have I to Sorrow O'er?
George Reginald Margetson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Rudyard Kipling: Irony, Sorrow, Longing. George Reginald Margetson: Peace, Spirituality, Sorrow.

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