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

Lascelles Abercrombie Lascelles Abercrombie

Poet B

Archibald MacLeish Archibald MacLeish
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 76% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
Lascelles Abercrombie

Lascelles Abercrombie

9 January 1881 – 27 October 1938 (~57)
1 live poem · English

In the verdant countryside of Victorian England, on January 9, 1881, a voice was born that would become one of the most distinctive—and contentious—in early twentieth-century British poetry. Lascelles Abercrombie arrived into a world still enchanted by Tennyson's melodies and Browning's dramatic monologues, yet he would live to witness the seismic upheavals of modernism, two world wars, and the transformation of poet…

“There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Irony
Listen Timeline Affinities
Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish

7 May 1892 – 20 April 1982 (~90)
2 live poems · English

In the pantheon of twentieth-century American letters, few figures embodied as many contradictions and reconciliations as Archibald MacLeish. Born on May 7, 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois, and dying on April 20, 1982, in Boston, Massachusetts, MacLeish lived through nearly the entire span of the American century, bearing witness to two world wars, the Great Depression, the atomic age, and the cultural revolutions that re…

“What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Lascelles Abercrombie
Archibald MacLeish
1881 1982
They overlapped for 47 years (1892–1938). When Archibald MacLeish was born, Lascelles Abercrombie was about 11. Archibald MacLeish was about 46 when Lascelles Abercrombie died.
Lascelles Abercrombie in history Archibald MacLeish in history Years they were given

On the map

About 6,114 km separate Ashton-upon-Mersey, Cheshire, England from Glencoe, Illinois, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Lascelles Abercrombie

Archibald MacLeish

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

Lascelles Abercrombie only

death perfection epitaph desire philosophical fortune freedom

Archibald MacLeish only

world dead history witness legend youth grief dance romance stars wheat

From the biographies

Lascelles Abercrombie: victorian england, ashton-upon-mersey, catherine gwatkin, interludes and poems, georgian poetry, dymock poets, emblems of love, the sale of st. thomas. Archibald MacLeish: glencoe, illinois, harvard law school, ada hitchcock, the hamlet of a. macleish, conquistador, pulitzer prize, the happy marriage and other poems, the pot of earth.

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.

Epitaph
Lascelles Abercrombie
73%
Compare
The Too-Late Born
Archibald MacLeish
Epitaph
Lascelles Abercrombie
72% life
Compare
Youth is old before his time
Archibald MacLeish

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1892 Opening of Ellis Island
1892 Valéry undergoes the Genoa crisis
1893 Co-founding of the Gaelic League
1893 Delivery of 'The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland' Speech
1893 Publication of 'The Hound of Heaven'
1894 Death of Robert Louis Stevenson
1894 Valéry begins his lifelong notebooks
1895 Publication of 'The Red Badge of Courage'

Lascelles Abercrombie

1908 Publication of 'Interludes and Poems'
1909 Marriage to Catherine Gwatkin
1910 Move to London
1914 Publication of 'The Dance of Death'
1916 Publication of 'A Book of Poems'
1920 Involvement in Literary Criticism
1922 Publication of 'The Poet's Testament'
1930 Publication of 'The Complete Poems'

Archibald MacLeish

1911 Enrollment at Yale University
1917 First Major Publication: 'The Pot of Earth'
1918 Service in World War I
1932 Publication of 'Conquistador'
1939 Appointment as Librarian of Congress
1941 Publication of 'The Land of the Free'
1952 Nobel Prize in Literature
1967 Publication of 'The New Earth'

Emotional landscapes

Lascelles Abercrombie: Despair, Sorrow, Irony. Archibald MacLeish: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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