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

Harold Monro Harold Monro

Poet B

Edna Wahlert McCourt Edna Wahlert McCourt
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 62% Poems 82% Blended 71%
Swap sides Another related pair
Harold Monro

Harold Monro

14 March 1879 – 16 March 1932 (~53)
2 live poems · English

In the heart of Georgian London, amid the tumult of a literary revolution that would reshape English poetry forever, stood a slight, melancholic figure whose contribution to modern literature far exceeded his own poetic achievements. Harold Edward Monro, born on March 14, 1879, in Brussels to Scottish parents, would become the impresario of modernism, the keeper of poetry's most famous bookshop, and a poet whose work…

“The modern poet's equipment must include, apart from the natural adoration of beauty, a clear and sound grasp upon facts, and a stupendous aptitude for assimilation.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
Listen Timeline Affinities
Edna Wahlert McCourt

Edna Wahlert McCourt

19 July 1887 – 4 January 1963 (~76)
2 live poems · English

Edna Wahlert McCourt, born Edna Wahlert on 19 July 1887 and dead on 4 January 1963, belonged to a generation of American women writers whose literary lives were often sustained through friendship, little magazines, local institutions, family networks, and persistent private labor rather than through the highly visible routes to fame available to a few celebrated contemporaries. She is remembered principally as a poet…

“We were just recollecting how speech in strange tongues came to men in the Bible days.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Harold Monro
Edna Wahlert McCourt
1879 1963
They overlapped for 46 years (1887–1932). When Edna Wahlert McCourt was born, Harold Monro was about 8. Edna Wahlert McCourt was about 45 when Harold Monro died.
Harold Monro in history Edna Wahlert McCourt in history Years they were given

On the map

About 7,831 km separate Brussels, Belgium from Denver, Colorado, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Harold Monro

Edna Wahlert McCourt

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

love ritual

Harold Monro only

room sound speech listener weather milk desire world domestic longing animal ecstatic

Edna Wahlert McCourt only

spring memory nature water stoop gladness wandered drinking music life heart breath

From the biographies

Harold Monro: brussels, georgian poetry, the poetry review, poetry bookshop, milk for the cat, children of love, strange meetings, the earth for sale. Edna Wahlert McCourt: denver, colorado, st. louis, potter's wheel, sara teasdale, her america, the new poetry, poetry magazine.

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.

A Word
Harold Monro
77% love
Compare
Query—A Musician speaks
Edna Wahlert McCourt
A Word
Harold Monro
70%
Compare
I Have Wandered to a Spring
Edna Wahlert McCourt
Milk for the Cat
Harold Monro
70% ritual
Compare
I Have Wandered to a Spring
Edna Wahlert McCourt
Milk for the Cat
Harold Monro
66%
Compare
Query—A Musician speaks
Edna Wahlert McCourt

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1891 Conversion to Roman Catholicism
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

Harold Monro

1906 Monro and Maurice Browne found the Samurai Press
1910 Publication of 'The Passionate Heart'
1912 Monro launches The Poetry Review in London
1913 Monro meets Alida Klemantaski
1913 Opening of the Poetry Bookshop
1915 Publication of 'The New Poetry'
1915 Publication of Children of Love
1916 Monro serves in the war and Alida keeps the Bookshop

Edna Wahlert McCourt

1908 Marriage of Edna Wahlert McCourt
1908 Relocation to St. Louis
1920 Involvement with the Potters literary group
1920 Publication of 'Strangers'
1925 Modeling for the Parrish sisters
1930 Publication in Poetry magazine
1935 Publication of 'I Have Wandered to a Spring'
1940 Recognition in St. Louis literary circles

Emotional landscapes

Harold Monro: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Edna Wahlert McCourt: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.

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