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

T. Sturge Moore T. Sturge Moore

Poet B

William Vaughn Moody William Vaughn Moody
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 74% Blended 74%
Swap sides Another related pair
T. Sturge Moore

T. Sturge Moore

4 March 1870 – 18 July 1944 (~74)
1 live poem · English

Thomas Sturge Moore, born on 4 March 1870 at Hastings, Sussex, and dead on 18 July 1944 at Windsor, was one of the most distinctive English poet-artists of his generation: a writer of symbolist and classical verse, a critic of painting and artistic purpose, a wood engraver, and an accomplished designer of books. He belonged to that transitional company whose work joined the late Victorian devotion to beauty, craftsma…

“The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities
William Vaughn Moody

William Vaughn Moody

8 July 1869 – 17 October 1910 (~41)
1 live poem · English

In the flickering gaslight of late nineteenth-century America, as the nation struggled to reconcile its frontier spirit with emerging urban sophistication, William Vaughn Moody emerged as a literary voice uniquely suited to capture this profound cultural tension. Born on July 8, 1869, in Spencer, Indiana, and dying far too young on October 17, 1910, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Moody's forty-one years encompassed a…

“I think you are not tolerant enough of the instinct for conquest in language, the attempt to push out its boundaries, to win for it continually some new swiftness, some rare compression, to distil from it a more opaline drop.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

T. Sturge Moore
William Vaughn Moody
1869 1944
They overlapped for 41 years (1870–1910). When T. Sturge Moore was born, William Vaughn Moody was about 1. T. Sturge Moore was about 40 when William Vaughn Moody died.
T. Sturge Moore in history William Vaughn Moody in history Years they were given

On the map

About 6,681 km separate 3 Wellington Square, Hastings, East Sussex from Spencer, Indiana, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

T. Sturge Moore

William Vaughn Moody

Open both on the History Atlas

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

T. Sturge Moore only

swan love pain dying beauty suffering death

William Vaughn Moody only

divine heart despair hills

From the biographies

T. Sturge Moore: hastings, windsor, george edward moore, the vinedresser and other poems, the centaur’s booty, the rout of the amazons, classical verse, pre-raphaelites. William Vaughn Moody: spencer, indiana, colorado springs, francis burdette moody, henrietta stoy moody, harvard university, robert morss lovett, the complete poetical works of john milton, poems.

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 Dying Swan
T. Sturge Moore
67%
Compare
I stood within the heart of God
William Vaughn Moody

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1870 Hardy Meets Emma Lavinia Gifford in Cornwall
1870 Second Industrial Revolution Accelerates
1871 Publication of 'Middlemarch'
1871 Publication of 'Rimas'
1873 Maxwell publishes Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in Cambridge
1873 Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' Composition
1876 1876-78 Super El Niño Causes Worldwide Famines
1876 Gerard Manley Hopkins composes his major poems

T. Sturge Moore

1881 Education at Dulwich College
1888 Artistic Training at Lambeth School of Art
1899 Publication of 'The Vinedresser and Other Poems'
1900 Friendship with W.B. Yeats
1903 Marriage to Mary Sturge Moore
1910 Publication of 'The Poet's Craft'
1920 Publication of 'The Green Book'
1940 Final Years in Hastings

William Vaughn Moody

1884 Moody's Mother Passes Away
1885 Graduation as Valedictorian
1886 Moody's Father Passes Away
1889 Attends Harvard University
1901 First Major Publication: 'The Masque of Poets'
1902 Publication of 'The Fire Bringer'
1904 Publication of 'The Great God Success'
1910 Final Publication: 'The Last Poems'

Emotional landscapes

T. Sturge Moore: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing. William Vaughn Moody: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.

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