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

Lizette Woodworth Reese Lizette Woodworth Reese

Poet B

Elizabeth Devereux Elizabeth Devereux
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 76% Poems 86% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Lizette Woodworth Reese

Lizette Woodworth Reese

9 January 1856 – 17 December 1935 (~79)
3 live poems · English

Lizette Woodworth Reese was born on 9 January 1856 in the Greenspring Valley area of Baltimore County, Maryland, and died in Baltimore on 17 December 1935. Her long life joined two very different literary ages. She was formed by the cadences, moral seriousness, and cultivated sentiment of nineteenth-century verse, yet some of her finest poems possess the compression, pictorial clarity, and emotional reserve that late…

“Thrice blessed are they whose early years are spent in some countryside. The flowering and withering of the seasons, and every exquisite sound and sight make them affluent with a treasure which neither change nor chance can steal away.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
Elizabeth Devereux

Elizabeth Devereux

12 March 1934 – 29 July 2023 (~89)
2 live poems · English

Elizabeth Devereux was born on 12 March 1934 in Singapore, then a British colonial port whose commercial prosperity, cultural variety, and precarious imperial order formed the background of her earliest years. She died on 29 July 2023, aged eighty-nine, after a life that crossed continents, social worlds, and ideas of what a literary life ought to look like. Though she did not achieve conventional public recognition…

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace

In time

Lizette Woodworth Reese
Elizabeth Devereux
1856 2023
They overlapped for 2 years (1934–1935). When Elizabeth Devereux was born, Lizette Woodworth Reese was about 78. Elizabeth Devereux was about 1 when Lizette Woodworth Reese died.

On the map

About 15,480 km separate Greenspring, Baltimore County, Maryland, USA from Singapore. 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

memory social

Lizette Woodworth Reese: baltimore, greenspring valley, david reese, mary elizabeth woodworth reese, a branch of may, tears, a handful of lavender, a quiet road. Elizabeth Devereux: singapore, second world war, japanese invasion, boarding school, royal air force pilot, seville, unpublished poems, displacement.

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.

Fortune
Lizette Woodworth Reese
83%
Compare
The Wealth of Nothing
Elizabeth Devereux
Fortune
Lizette Woodworth Reese
76%
Compare
Invisible
Elizabeth Devereux
Tears
Lizette Woodworth Reese
75% life
Compare
Invisible
Elizabeth Devereux
Lydia
Lizette Woodworth Reese
72% life
Compare
Invisible
Elizabeth Devereux
Tears
Lizette Woodworth Reese
72%
Compare
The Wealth of Nothing
Elizabeth Devereux
Lydia
Lizette Woodworth Reese
69%
Compare
The Wealth of Nothing
Elizabeth Devereux

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Lizette Woodworth Reese: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. Elizabeth Devereux: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.

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