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

Owen Seaman Owen Seaman

Poet B

G. K. Chesterton G. K. Chesterton
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 73% Poems 79% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
Owen Seaman

Owen Seaman

18 September 1861 – 2 February 1936 (~75)
2 live poems · English

Owen Seaman, born on 18 September 1861 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, and dead on 2 February 1936, occupied an unusually influential place in British literary culture for a man whose name is now less familiar than the names of many writers he parodied, edited, or helped to popularize. Poet, humorist, classicist, journalist, critic, lecturer, and long-serving editor of Punch, he was one of the most conspicuous representat…

“For, though the subject deals with a serious problem of the hour, it can be treated, and is treated, with a very permissible humour that just stops short of farce.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Anger
G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton

29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936 (~62)
13 live poems · English

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on 29 May 1874 at Campden Hill in Kensington, London, into a comfortable middle-class household whose mixture of security, imagination, and mild religious seriousness helped to form one of the most exuberant literary personalities of the twentieth century. He died on 14 June 1936 at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, after a career that made him internationally recognizable as an essayis…

“Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Hymn Writers, Light Verse Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Political Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing

In time

Owen Seaman
G. K. Chesterton
1861 1936
They overlapped for 63 years (1874–1936). When G. K. Chesterton was born, Owen Seaman was about 13.

On the map

About 220 km separate Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England from Kensington, 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

Owen Seaman: shrewsbury, punch, edwardian wit, clare college, rossall school, the battle of the bays, in cap and bells, borrowed plumes. G. K. Chesterton: campden hill, beaconsfield, father brown, orthodoxy, the wild knight, frances blogg, edmund clerihew bentley, clerihew.

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.

Thomas of the Light Heart
Owen Seaman
73%
Compare
The Kingdom of Heaven
G. K. Chesterton
Thomas of the Light Heart
Owen Seaman
73% light, world
Compare
Ballad of the Sun
G. K. Chesterton
Thomas of the Light Heart
Owen Seaman
71%
Compare
A Hymn
G. K. Chesterton
To a False Patriot
Owen Seaman
70%
Compare
A Hymn
G. K. Chesterton

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Owen Seaman: Irony, Sorrow, Anger. G. K. Chesterton: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.

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