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

Clifford Bax Clifford Bax

Poet B

Bernard Barton Bernard Barton
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 75% Poems 87% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
Clifford Bax

Clifford Bax

13 July 1886 – 18 November 1962 (~76)
2 live poems · English

In the landscape of early twentieth-century English letters, few figures embodied such versatility and contradiction as Clifford Lea Bax. Born on July 13, 1886, in Upper Tooting, south London, into an affluent family that would nurture two remarkable artistic talents, Bax lived until November 18, 1962, leaving behind a body of work that, while often overshadowed by more celebrated contemporaries, offers a fascinating…

“A man's life is written in his work, but to read it clearly one needs the cipher of his period.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Peace, Tenderness
Bernard Barton

Bernard Barton

31 January 1784 – 19 February 1849 (~65)
3 live poems · English

In the quiet market town of Woodbridge, Suffolk, where the River Deben winds its way toward the North Sea, lived one of the 19th century's most prolific yet paradoxical literary figures. Bernard Barton (1784-1849) occupied a unique position in English literature—a devout Quaker who found himself torn between the commercial demands of banking and the irrepressible call of poetry. His life story reads like a gentle reb…

“I have no alternative between not writing at all, and writing what first comes into my head.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace

In time

Clifford Bax
Bernard Barton
1784 1962
Their lives did not overlap. 37 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 422 km separate Lambeth, London, England from Carlisle, Cumberland, England. 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

social

Clifford Bax: upper tooting, hampstead, theosophy, william butler yeats, twenty chinese poems, poems dramatic and lyrical, the school of plato, woodland wisdom. Bernard Barton: woodbridge, carlisle, quaker, charles lamb, lucy jesup, metrical effusions, poems, the convict's return.

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 Cottage
Clifford Bax
81%
Compare
On Some Pictures
Bernard Barton
Youth
Clifford Bax
79% beauty
Compare
All Is Vanity
Bernard Barton
Youth
Clifford Bax
77% beauty
Compare
On Some Pictures
Bernard Barton
The Cottage
Clifford Bax
76%
Compare
On True Worship
Bernard Barton
The Cottage
Clifford Bax
76% world
Compare
All Is Vanity
Bernard Barton
Youth
Clifford Bax
73%
Compare
On True Worship
Bernard Barton

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Clifford Bax: Longing, Peace, Tenderness. Bernard Barton: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.

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