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

Nora Hopper Chesson Nora Hopper Chesson

Poet B

Alice Meynell Alice Meynell
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 91% Blended 82%
Swap sides Another related pair
Nora Hopper Chesson

Nora Hopper Chesson

2 January 1871 – 14 April 1906 (~35)
79 live poems · English

Nora Hopper Chesson, born Nora Hopper on 2 January 1871 in Exeter, England, and dead on 14 April 1906, belongs to that compelling company of poets whose work has remained more vivid than their public reputation. Her life was brief, her published oeuvre relatively small, and the surviving record of her private circumstances incomplete. Yet the poems she left behind possess a distinctive pressure and atmosphere: they a…

“Therefore, let us begin Christmas Day with setting light to an ashen faggot to serve for the oak Yule log, if we be Devonshire born.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell

11 October 1847 – 27 November 1922 (~75)
3 live poems · English

Alice Meynell, born Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson on 11 October 1847 and dead on 27 November 1922, was one of the most distinctive English writers to work across the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. A poet of exquisite compression, an essayist of alert and sensuous intelligence, a critic, editor, Catholic public intellectual, and campaigner for women’s suffrage, she made a literary identity that cannot be r…

“Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Tenderness

In time

Nora Hopper Chesson
Alice Meynell
1847 1922
They overlapped for 36 years (1871–1906). When Nora Hopper Chesson was born, Alice Meynell was about 24. Alice Meynell was about 59 when Nora Hopper Chesson died.

On the map

About 243 km separate Exeter, Devon, England from Barnes, London, England. Both have ground in London.

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

Nora Hopper Chesson: exeter, irish literary revival, under quicken boughs, celtic legend, wilfrid hugh chesson, fin de siècle, decadence, folk revival. Alice Meynell: edwardian, wilfrid meynell, preludes, renouncement, catholicism, francis thompson, the colour of life, the lady poverty.

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.

May Eve
Nora Hopper Chesson
83% love, silence, beloved, presence
Compare
To the Beloved
Alice Meynell
To the Ladies Des Baux
Nora Hopper Chesson
81% love
Compare
My heart shall be thy garden
Alice Meynell
Gypsy Song
Nora Hopper Chesson
81% beloved, life, love
Compare
To the Beloved
Alice Meynell
The Dinny Math
Nora Hopper Chesson
80%
Compare
My heart shall be thy garden
Alice Meynell
One Way of Love
Nora Hopper Chesson
80% love, beloved
Compare
To the Beloved
Alice Meynell
A Song of Five
Nora Hopper Chesson
80% presence, silence
Compare
To the Beloved
Alice Meynell

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Nora Hopper Chesson: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness. Alice Meynell: Longing, Spirituality, Tenderness.

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