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

Thomas Paine Thomas Paine

Poet B

Alphonse de Lamartine Alphonse de Lamartine
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 67% Blended 67%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine

9 February 1737 – 8 June 1809 (~72)
1 live poem · English

Thomas Paine, born 9 February 1737 and dead on 8 June 1809, was one of the most consequential writers of the revolutionary Atlantic world. He was not primarily a poet in the conventional sense, nor should his occasional verses be allowed to obscure the achievement for which he is remembered: he made political argument into a popular literary force. In pamphlets, newspaper essays, public letters, and philosophical tre…

“The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Enlightenment Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Sensuality, Joy
Alphonse de Lamartine

Alphonse de Lamartine

21 October 1790 – 1 March 1869 (~79)
2 live poems · French

Alphonse de Lamartine was born on 21 October 1790 in Mâcon, in the Burgundy region of eastern France, and died in Paris on 1 March 1869. Poet, novelist, historian, diplomat, parliamentarian, and revolutionary statesman, he lived at the point where literary Romanticism and modern French political life came into being. Few writers have more completely embodied the nineteenth-century belief that eloquence might be a pub…

“I am tired of museums, those cemeteries of the arts.”

Neighbourhood: Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Sensuality

In time

Thomas Paine
Alphonse de Lamartine
1737 1869
They overlapped for 20 years (1790–1809). When Alphonse de Lamartine was born, Thomas Paine was about 53. Alphonse de Lamartine was about 19 when Thomas Paine died.

On the map

About 740 km separate Thetford, Norfolk, England from Mâcon, Burgundy, France. 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

french revolution

Thomas Paine: thetford, norfolk, common sense, the american crisis, benjamin franklin, mary lambert, elizabeth ollive, deism. Alphonse de Lamartine: mâcon, burgundy, le lac, méditations poétiques, julie charles, voyage en orient, mary ann birch, romanticism.

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.

What Is Love?
Thomas Paine
69% love
Compare
Le lac
Alphonse de Lamartine
What Is Love?
Thomas Paine
65%
Compare
Le Papillon
Alphonse de Lamartine

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Paine: Wonder, Sensuality, Joy. Alphonse de Lamartine: Longing, Wonder, Sensuality.

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