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.

After the death of my mother, 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.

My wife and I are simplifying our days. The server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the quieter life we want.

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.

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

Edward Hovell-Thurlow Edward Hovell-Thurlow

Poet B

George Darley George Darley
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 80% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Edward Hovell-Thurlow

Edward Hovell-Thurlow

10 June 1781 – 4 June 1829 (~48)
2 live poems · English

Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow, was born on 10 June 1781 in the Temple, London, and died at Brighton on 4 June 1829, six days before his forty-eighth birthday. He lived during one of the most turbulent and brilliant eras in English literary history: the age of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Regency, and the flowering of Romantic poetry. Yet he occupied an unusual position within that age…

Neighbourhood: Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Tenderness
George Darley

George Darley

December 1795 – 23 November 1846 (~51)
1 live poem · English

George Darley was born in Dublin in December 1795 and died in London on 23 November 1846. He belongs among those gifted nineteenth-century writers whose lives complicate the comforting assumption that talent naturally finds its public. During his lifetime he was respected by a small number of discerning contemporaries, employed steadily enough in literary and educational work, and capable of producing poetry of extra…

“Fashionability is a kind of elevated vulgarity.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Wonder

In time

Edward Hovell-Thurlow
George Darley
1781 1846
They overlapped for 35 years (1795–1829). When George Darley was born, Edward Hovell-Thurlow was about 14. George Darley was about 34 when Edward Hovell-Thurlow died.

On the map

About 464 km separate Westminster, London, England from Dublin, Ireland. Both have ground in London.

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

Edward Hovell-Thurlow: temple, london, brighton, second baron thurlow, thomas thurlow, anne bere, edward thurlow, charterhouse school, magdalen college, oxford. George Darley: london, nepenthe, the errors of ecstasie, sylvia; or, the may queen, trinity college dublin, arthur darley, charles lamb, romantic literature.

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.

May
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
77%
Compare
The Phoenix
George Darley
The Summer
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
73% beauty
Compare
The Phoenix
George Darley

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Edward Hovell-Thurlow: Joy, Wonder, Tenderness. George Darley: Despair, Sorrow, Wonder.

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