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

John Boyle O'Reilly John Boyle O'Reilly
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 60% Poems 81% Blended 69%
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…

“It is charming to be a well-known young poet: besides, it is of professional value.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
John Boyle O'Reilly

John Boyle O'Reilly

28 June 1844 – 10 August 1890 (~46)
12 live poems · English

On a June morning in 1844, at Dowth Castle near the banks of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, a boy was born into a world of contradictions—a world of ancient Celtic splendour and modern British subjugation, of rich oral tradition and stony colonial reality. That boy, John Boyle O'Reilly, would grow to embody those contradictions more fully than perhaps any Irish-American figure of the nineteenth century: so…

“The right of revolution is sacred. It is the right of self-defence against tyranny.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Irish Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow

In time

Harold Monro
John Boyle O'Reilly
1844 1932
They overlapped for 12 years (1879–1890). When Harold Monro was born, John Boyle O'Reilly was about 35. Harold Monro was about 11 when John Boyle O'Reilly died.

On the map

About 800 km separate Brussels, Belgium from Dowth, County Meath, Ireland. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

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

Harold Monro: brussels, georgian poetry, the poetry review, poetry bookshop, milk for the cat, children of love, strange meetings, the earth for sale. John Boyle O'Reilly: county meath, dowth castle, irish republican brotherhood, fenian movement, tenth hussars, boston pilot, father patrick mccabe, captain david r..

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
75% sound
Compare
The Useless Ones
John Boyle O'Reilly
A Word
Harold Monro
74%
Compare
An Old Picture
John Boyle O'Reilly
A Word
Harold Monro
72%
Compare
The Cry of the Dreamer
John Boyle O'Reilly
A Word
Harold Monro
72%
Compare
What is Good
John Boyle O'Reilly
A Word
Harold Monro
71%
Compare
To-Day
John Boyle O'Reilly
A Word
Harold Monro
70%
Compare
My Troubles
John Boyle O'Reilly

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Harold Monro: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. John Boyle O'Reilly: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow.

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