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

Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift

Poet B

Mark Akenside Mark Akenside
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 57% Poems 72% Blended 64%
Swap sides Another related pair
Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift

30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745 (~78)
2 live poems · English

The life of Jonathan Swift presents one of literature's most fascinating paradoxes: a clergyman who wrote with brutal satirical force, an Irishman who felt himself English, a conservative who championed the oppressed, and a misanthrope whose fury arose from disappointed idealism. Born into poverty and obscurity, Swift became one of the most powerful prose writers in the English language, creating works that continue…

“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.”

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Irish Poets, Light Verse Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Fear, Despair
Mark Akenside

Mark Akenside

9 November 1721 – 23 June 1770 (~49)
2 live poems · English

Mark Akenside was born on 9 November 1721 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and died in London on 23 June 1770. He was one of the most ambitious English poets of the mid-eighteenth century: a physician of substantial professional distinction, a political partisan, a learned student of philosophy and natural science, and the author of The Pleasures of Imagination, a poem that sought nothing less than to explain how the mind rec…

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Georgian Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Joy

In time

Jonathan Swift
Mark Akenside
1667 1770
They overlapped for 25 years (1721–1745). When Mark Akenside was born, Jonathan Swift was about 54. Mark Akenside was about 24 when Jonathan Swift died.

On the map

About 352 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Newcastle upon Tyne, 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

Jonathan Swift: gulliver's travels, a modest proposal, the drapier's letters, esther johnson, william temple, the examiner, robert harley, henry st. john. Mark Akenside: newcastle upon tyne, the pleasures of imagination, robert dodsley, joseph addison, philip doddridge, blank verse, enlightenment, whig.

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.

Clever Tom Clinch Going to Be Hanged
Jonathan Swift
66% social
Compare
The Complaint
Mark Akenside
A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed
Jonathan Swift
64% social
Compare
The Complaint
Mark Akenside
A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed
Jonathan Swift
64% beauty
Compare
Amoret
Mark Akenside
Clever Tom Clinch Going to Be Hanged
Jonathan Swift
56%
Compare
Amoret
Mark Akenside

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Jonathan Swift: Irony, Fear, Despair. Mark Akenside: Longing, Tenderness, Joy.

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