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

Archibald MacLeish Archibald MacLeish

Poet B

John McCrae John McCrae
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 68% Blended 68%
Swap sides Another related pair
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
John McCrae

John McCrae

30 November 1872 – 28 January 1918 (~46)
1 live poem · English

John McCrae was born on 30 November 1872 in Guelph, Ontario, then a prosperous and growing town in Canada’s province of Ontario. He died on 28 January 1918 at Wimereux, France, before the war that made his name famous had ended. In the short span between those dates, he became several things at once: physician, medical teacher, pathologist, soldier, officer, friend, and poet. To later generations he is overwhelmingly…

“I am really rather afraid, but more afraid to stay at home with my conscience.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Archibald MacLeish
John McCrae
1872 1982
They overlapped for 27 years (1892–1918). When Archibald MacLeish was born, John McCrae was about 20. Archibald MacLeish was about 26 when John McCrae died.
Archibald MacLeish in history John McCrae in history Years they were given

On the map

About 632 km separate Glencoe, Illinois, USA from Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Archibald MacLeish

John McCrae

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

world dead life

Archibald MacLeish only

history witness legend youth grief dance romance stars wheat

John McCrae only

death crosses flanders fields

From the biographies

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. John McCrae: guelph, ontario, in flanders fields, second boer war, canadian field artillery, alexis helmer, victorian ideals, royal victoria hospital.

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 Too-Late Born
Archibald MacLeish
79% world, dead
Compare
In Flanders Fields
John McCrae
Youth is old before his time
Archibald MacLeish
77% world, life
Compare
In Flanders Fields
John McCrae

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'

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'

John McCrae

1890 Graduation from Guelph Collegiate Institute
1898 Medical Degree from University of Toronto
1899 Service in the Second Boer War
1900 Pathology Studies at McGill University
1911 Publication of First Collection of Poetry
1914 Appointment as Medical Officer in WWI
1918 Final Days in France
1918 Illness and Hospitalization

Emotional landscapes

Archibald MacLeish: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. John McCrae: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

Skip to main content