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

W. H. Davies W. H. Davies

Poet B

William Ellery Leonard William Ellery Leonard
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 69% Poems 84% Blended 76%
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…

“It takes more than a short holiday to get a real love of Nature; such a love as makes trees like human companions, and green the colour we look for everywhere we go.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing
William Ellery Leonard

William Ellery Leonard

25 January 1876 – 2 May 1944 (~68)
2 live poems · English

On January 25, 1876, in the quiet town of Plainfield, New Jersey, William Ellery Channing Leonard was born into a world of literary aspiration and transcendentalist idealism. His parents, fervent admirers of the New England intellectual tradition, named their only child after William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian minister who had mentored Ralph Waldo Emerson. This choice of name proved prophetic, for Leonard would s…

“We are human from the start. We do not need to see a man die to know death. Death is born with our birth.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Confessional Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

W. H. Davies
William Ellery Leonard
1871 1944
They overlapped for 65 years (1876–1940). When William Ellery Leonard was born, W. H. Davies was about 5. William Ellery Leonard was about 64 when W. H. Davies died.

On the map

About 5,414 km separate Newport, Wales from Plainfield, New Jersey, USA. 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

social

W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp. William Ellery Leonard: plainfield, new jersey, charlotte freeman, two lives, sonnets and poems, the lynching bee and other poems, agoraphobia, madison mob, boston university.

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
78% beloved
Compare
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard
Love's Caution
W. H. Davies
78% love
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
Love's Inspiration
W. H. Davies
78% love
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
My Youth
W. H. Davies
78% youth, self
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
An Early Love
W. H. Davies
76% love
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
The Two Lives
W. H. Davies
75%
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard

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. William Ellery Leonard: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

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