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

John Crowe Ransom John Crowe Ransom

Poet B

T. S. Eliot T. S. Eliot
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 66% Poems 87% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom

30 April 1888 – 3 July 1974 (~86)
4 live poems · English

John Crowe Ransom stood at the crossroads of American poetry and criticism in the twentieth century, a figure whose influence extended far beyond the elegant verses he composed. Born on April 30, 1888, in Pulaski, Tennessee, he would become the architect of a critical revolution, the mentor to some of America's finest poets, and the principal voice of a distinctly Southern literary aesthetic that sought to reconcile…

“It does not matter whether we call them sciences or just systematic studies; the total effort of each to be effective must be consolidated and kept going.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965 (~77)
14 live poems · English

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…

“The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony

In time

John Crowe Ransom
T. S. Eliot
1888 1974
They overlapped for 78 years (1888–1965). They were born in the same year. John Crowe Ransom was about 77 when T. S. Eliot died.

On the map

About 473 km separate Pulaski, Tennessee, USA from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Shared ground: United States.

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

tradition

John Crowe Ransom: pulaski, tennessee, john james ransom, ella crowe ransom, vanderbilt university, fugitive group, the fugitive, allen tate, robert penn warren. T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne.

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.

Her Eyes
John Crowe Ransom
79% eyes
Compare
Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears
T. S. Eliot
Features of Creatures
John Crowe Ransom
77% world
Compare
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
Features of Creatures
John Crowe Ransom
76%
Compare
Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
Her Eyes
John Crowe Ransom
76%
Compare
Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
Features of Creatures
John Crowe Ransom
75% world, social
Compare
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
T. S. Eliot
Here Lies a Lady
John Crowe Ransom
75%
Compare
La Figlia Che Piange
T. S. Eliot

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

John Crowe Ransom: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.

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