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

Yone Noguchi Yone Noguchi

Poet B

Robert Bridges Robert Bridges
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 82% Blended 70%
Swap sides Another related pair
Yone Noguchi

Yone Noguchi

8 December 1875 – 13 July 1947 (~72)
4 live poems · English

In the annals of literary history, few figures occupy as singular a position as Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who dared to write primarily in English during an era when such a choice seemed almost inconceivable. Born Yonejiro Noguchi on December 8, 1875, in the coastal town of Tsushima near Nagoya, Japan, he would become a pioneering voice in cross-cultural literature, a man who walked between East and West with rema…

“The mere existence of them as flowers is slight; but it is our imagination that makes them great.”

Neighbourhood: Imagist Poets, Japanese Haiku Masters, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness
Robert Bridges

Robert Bridges

23 October 1844 – 21 April 1930 (~86)
4 live poems · English

Robert Seymour Bridges was born on 23 October 1844 at Walmer, near Deal in Kent, into a prosperous and cultivated English family whose security gave him both educational opportunity and, eventually, the independence to pursue literature without needing to earn his living from it. He was the fourth son of John Thomas Bridges and Harriet Elizabeth Bridges. His father had served in the navy and later held administrative…

“In all fields of Art the imitators are far more numerous than the artists, and they will copy the externals.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder

In time

Yone Noguchi
Robert Bridges
1844 1947
They overlapped for 56 years (1875–1930). When Yone Noguchi was born, Robert Bridges was about 31. Yone Noguchi was about 55 when Robert Bridges died.

On the map

About 9,469 km separate Tsushima, Aichi, Japan from Walmer, Kent, England. 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

Yone Noguchi: tsushima, nagoya, keio university, joaquin miller, seen and unseen, the american diary of a japanese girl, from the eastern sea, the pilgrimage. Robert Bridges: walmer, eton college, corpus christi college, gerard manley hopkins, the growth of love, london snow, st bartholomew's hospital, hospital for sick children.

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.

Apparition
Yone Noguchi
73% love
Compare
Wooing
Robert Bridges
Apparition
Yone Noguchi
71%
Compare
Clear and Gentle Stream
Robert Bridges
Hokku
Yone Noguchi
70% life
Compare
Clear and Gentle Stream
Robert Bridges
I and Nature are one in sweet weariness
Yone Noguchi
69%
Compare
Wooing
Robert Bridges

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Yone Noguchi: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness. Robert Bridges: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder.

Skip to main content