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

Ada Cambridge Ada Cambridge

Poet B

Christina Rossetti Christina Rossetti
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 65% Poems 90% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
Ada Cambridge

Ada Cambridge

21 November 1844 – 19 July 1926 (~82)
6 live poems · English

Ada Cambridge, who would become one of colonial Australia's most prolific and quietly subversive literary voices, was born on 21 November 1844 at St Germans, Norfolk, England. She was the second child of Thomasine and Henry Cambridge, a gentleman farmer of comfortable means. The Norfolk countryside, with its flat, expansive skies and ancient, weathered churches, would seep into her imagination and later resurface in…

“Of the many happy experiences of life, few can match that of finding you have been one of the deities of a faithful heart for over twenty years of absence without knowing it.”

Neighbourhood: Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti

5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894 (~64)
68 live poems · English

To read Christina Rossetti is to enter a world of exquisite tension, a realm where the sacred and the sensual wage a quiet but ferocious war. She is the poet of renunciation who wrote some of the most sensuous verse in the English language, the devout Anglo-Catholic who filled her pages with goblin fruits that drip with irresistible juice, and the reclusive Victorian spinster whose inner life was a tumultuous landsca…

“I have not yet filled up your rhymes, but still hope to do so; only I will not delay writing till the inspiration comes.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair

In time

Ada Cambridge
Christina Rossetti
1830 1926
They overlapped for 51 years (1844–1894). When Ada Cambridge was born, Christina Rossetti was about 14. Ada Cambridge was about 50 when Christina Rossetti died.

On the map

About 135 km separate St Germans, Norfolk, England from 38 Charlotte Street, London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

woman faith

Ada Cambridge: st germans, norfolk, george frederick cross, the retrospect, hymns on the litany, hymns on the holy communion, up the murray, a marked man. Christina Rossetti: pre-raphaelite brotherhood, goblin market, the girlhood of mary virgin, dante gabriel rossetti, james collinson, charles bagot cayley, anglo-catholic, sing-song: a nursery rhyme book.

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.

Despair
Ada Cambridge
84% love
Compare
Confluents
Christina Rossetti
Despair
Ada Cambridge
83% life
Compare
One Certainty
Christina Rossetti
Despair
Ada Cambridge
82%
Compare
Mirage
Christina Rossetti
After Our Likeness
Ada Cambridge
82% life, death
Compare
One Certainty
Christina Rossetti
Despair
Ada Cambridge
81% life, spiritual
Compare
Dead Before Death
Christina Rossetti
After Our Likeness
Ada Cambridge
80%
Compare
Confluents
Christina Rossetti

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Ada Cambridge: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Christina Rossetti: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

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