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

Gordon Bottomley Gordon Bottomley

Poet B

Stephen Phillips Stephen Phillips
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 75% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
Gordon Bottomley

Gordon Bottomley

20 February 1874 – 25 August 1948 (~74)
1 live poem · English

In the pantheon of early twentieth-century British poetry, few figures occupy a more curious position than Gordon Bottomley—a man who spent much of his life confined by illness yet created some of the most ambitious and visually striking verse dramas of his era. Neither wholly Georgian nor fully Modernist, Bottomley carved out a distinctive space in English letters, one characterized by medieval reverie, Celtic mysti…

“The poetic drama is, indeed, not so much a representation of a theme as a meditation upon it or a distillation from it; its business is far less the simulation of life than the evocation and isolation for our delight of the elements of beauty and spiritual illumination in the perhaps terrible and always serious theme chosen.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
Stephen Phillips

Stephen Phillips

28 July 1864 – 9 December 1915 (~51)
4 live poems · English

Stephen Phillips, born on 28 July 1864 and dead at the distressingly early age of fifty-one on 9 December 1915, was one of the most celebrated English poets and verse dramatists of the years around 1900. For a brief but dazzling period, he seemed to many readers and theatre-goers to be the writer most likely to renew English poetic drama after Tennyson and Browning. His plays filled theatres, his poetry was widely re…

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Love Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder

In time

Gordon Bottomley
Stephen Phillips
1864 1948
They overlapped for 42 years (1874–1915). When Gordon Bottomley was born, Stephen Phillips was about 10. Gordon Bottomley was about 41 when Stephen Phillips died.

On the map

About 227 km separate Thornton, Yorkshire, England from Summertown, Oxford, England. Both have ground in England.

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.

From the biographies

drama play

Gordon Bottomley: keighley, celtic mysticism, the mickle drede, poems at white-nights, the crier by night, king lear's wife, gruach, laurence binyon. Stephen Phillips: summertown, oxford, cicely chilcott, paolo and francesca, christ in hades, marpessa, trinity college cambridge, verse drama revival.

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.

Atlantis
Gordon Bottomley
76%
Compare
A Dream
Stephen Phillips
Atlantis
Gordon Bottomley
76%
Compare
If it might be
Stephen Phillips
Atlantis
Gordon Bottomley
74%
Compare
Beautiful Lie the Dead
Stephen Phillips
Atlantis
Gordon Bottomley
73%
Compare
An Hour
Stephen Phillips

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Gordon Bottomley: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder. Stephen Phillips: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.

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