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

Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling
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 63% Poems 83% Blended 72%
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…

“What I like so much about meeting these strange people on the Open Road, is their plain and simple characters, which can be known, as a rule, in a few short hours.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing
Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936 (~71)
17 live poems · English

Rudyard Kipling was born Joseph Rudyard Kipling on December 30, 1865, in the bustling colonial port of Bombay, British India, a city that would forever pulse through his veins like the monsoon rains and the clamor of its streets. He died on January 18, 1936, in London, England, at the age of seventy, his body laid to rest in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey after a life that spanned the height of the British Empire…

“Being artists, these men must needs do the work that is laid upon them to do, and while they are doing it they are apt to overlook a number of important worldly considerations.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Longing

In time

W. H. Davies
Rudyard Kipling
1865 1940
They overlapped for 66 years (1871–1936). When W. H. Davies was born, Rudyard Kipling was about 6. W. H. Davies was about 65 when Rudyard Kipling died.

On the map

About 7,390 km separate Newport, Wales from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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. Rudyard Kipling: bombay, westminster abbey, the jungle book, just so stories, kim, gunga din, the light that failed, caroline balestier.

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 Starved
W. H. Davies
74% love, social
Compare
Mary, Pity Women!
Rudyard Kipling
The Captive Lion
W. H. Davies
73% power
Compare
An Astrologer's Song
Rudyard Kipling
Life is Jolly
W. H. Davies
72% life
Compare
If-
Rudyard Kipling
Love's Inspiration
W. H. Davies
72%
Compare
An Astrologer's Song
Rudyard Kipling
The Two Lives
W. H. Davies
72%
Compare
The Last of the Light Brigade
Rudyard Kipling
Life is Jolly
W. H. Davies
71%
Compare
Troopin'
Rudyard Kipling

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing. Rudyard Kipling: Irony, Sorrow, Longing.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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