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.

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

W. H. Davies W. H. Davies

Poet B

Francis Davison Francis Davison
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
W. H. Davies

W. H. Davies

3 July 1871 – 26 September 1940 (~69)
23 live poems · English

William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…

“I like to see a good scientific bout by men who know the use of their hands but would rather walk twenty miles than see animals in strife.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing
Francis Davison

Francis Davison

c. 1575 – c. 1619 (~44)
1 live poem · English

In the twilight of the Elizabethan era, when the English literary world shimmered with the brilliance of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney, there moved a quieter, more introspective figure whose voice, though softer, carried the weight of genuine poetic sensibility — Francis Davison. Born in 1575, and passing into obscurity by 1619, Davison’s life spanned the final decades of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign and the early ye…

“The bee and spider, by a diverse power, Suck honey and poison from the selfsame flower.”

Neighbourhood: Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

W. H. Davies
Francis Davison
1575 1940
Their lives did not overlap. 252 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 197 km separate Newport, Wales from London, England. Both have ground in England.

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

W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp. Francis Davison: elizabethan era, william davison, a poetical rhapsody, ben jonson, michael drayton, westminster school, oxford, sonnet form.

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.

Love's Inspiration
W. H. Davies
77% love, beloved, music
Compare
Sweet, if you like and love me still
Francis Davison
Love's Caution
W. H. Davies
74% love
Compare
Sweet, if you like and love me still
Francis Davison
Joy Supreme
W. H. Davies
72% beloved
Compare
Sweet, if you like and love me still
Francis Davison
An Early Love
W. H. Davies
71% love, beloved
Compare
Sweet, if you like and love me still
Francis Davison
My Youth
W. H. Davies
67%
Compare
Sweet, if you like and love me still
Francis Davison

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing. Francis Davison: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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