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.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this 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

Kahlil Gibran Kahlil Gibran

Poet B

William Stanley Braithwaite William Stanley Braithwaite
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 69% Poems 84% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran

6 January 1883 – 10 April 1931 (~48)
5 live poems · English

Kahlil Gibran, born on 6 January 1883 in the mountain town of Bsharri, in what is now northern Lebanon, and dead on 10 April 1931 in New York City, became one of the most widely read literary figures of the twentieth century. He was a poet, prose writer, essayist, painter, draftsman, cultural critic, and immigrant intellectual whose work traveled between Arabic and English, Lebanon and the United States, Christianity…

“I have existed from all eternity and, behold, I am here; and I shall exist till the end of time, for my being has no end.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Arabic Poets, Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Persian Mystic Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder
William Stanley Braithwaite

William Stanley Braithwaite

6 December 1878 – 8 June 1962 (~84)
2 live poems · English

William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite entered the world on December 6, 1878, in Boston, Massachusetts, a city pulsing with literary ambition and the lingering echoes of abolitionist fervor. He departed it on June 8, 1962, at his home on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem, New York, after a brief illness, at the age of eighty-three. In the eighty-three years between those dates, Braithwaite forged a remarkable life as poet, cr…

“No one can deny that here indeed was the key for large imaginings and energies which were capable of intensifying vision on a new plane of human experience.”

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Love Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Peace

In time

Kahlil Gibran
William Stanley Braithwaite
1878 1962
They overlapped for 49 years (1883–1931). When Kahlil Gibran was born, William Stanley Braithwaite was about 5. William Stanley Braithwaite was about 53 when Kahlil Gibran died.

On the map

About 8,725 km separate Bsharri, Lebanon from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in New York.

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

boston

Kahlil Gibran: bsharri, lebanon, new york city, the prophet, arab émigré literary movement, kamila rahmeh, khalil sa‘d gibran, mary elizabeth haskell. William Stanley Braithwaite: boston, massachusetts, harlem, new york, emma kelly, lyrics of life and love, the house of falling leaves, anthology of magazine verse, spingarn medal, atlanta university.

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.

Song of Man
Kahlil Gibran
76% heart
Compare
Rhapsody
William Stanley Braithwaite
A Tear and a Smile
Kahlil Gibran
75% life, sorrow
Compare
Rhapsody
William Stanley Braithwaite
A Tear and a Smile
Kahlil Gibran
75% life
Compare
Sic Vita
William Stanley Braithwaite
Song of Man
Kahlil Gibran
74% heart
Compare
Sic Vita
William Stanley Braithwaite
On Prayer
Kahlil Gibran
72% world, life
Compare
Rhapsody
William Stanley Braithwaite
On Talking
Kahlil Gibran
71%
Compare
Rhapsody
William Stanley Braithwaite

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Kahlil Gibran: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder. William Stanley Braithwaite: Joy, Wonder, Peace.

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