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

Countee Cullen Countee Cullen

Poet B

Madison Julius Cawein Madison Julius Cawein
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% Poems 88% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen

30 May 1903 – 9 January 1946 (~43)
4 live poems · English

On May 30, 1903, a child was born who would become one of the most celebrated voices of the Harlem Renaissance, yet whose origins remain shrouded in the kind of mystery that seems almost poetic in retrospect. Countee Cullen's exact birthplace has been disputed—some records suggest New York City, others Louisville, Kentucky, and still others Baltimore, Maryland. This uncertainty about his origins would prove oddly fit…

“Most things I write I do for the sheer love of the music in them. Somehow or other, however, I find my poetry of itself treating of the Negro, of his joys and his sorrows—mostly of the latter—and of the heights and the depths of emotion which I feel as a Negro.”

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness
Listen Timeline Affinities
Madison Julius Cawein

Madison Julius Cawein

23 March 1865 – 8 December 1914 (~49)
4 live poems · English

Madison Julius Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on 23 March 1865, at the unsettled close of the Civil War, and died there on 8 December 1914, not yet fifty years old. During his lifetime he was among the best-known American poets of his generation, a writer praised by influential editors, admired in Britain as well as the United States, and affectionately called the “Keats of Kentucky.” After his death, howev…

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Countee Cullen
Madison Julius Cawein
1865 1946
They overlapped for 12 years (1903–1914). When Countee Cullen was born, Madison Julius Cawein was about 38. Countee Cullen was about 11 when Madison Julius Cawein died.
Countee Cullen in history Madison Julius Cawein in history Years they were given

On the map

About 0 km separate Louisville, Kentucky, USA from Louisville, Kentucky, USA. Both have ground in Louisville and Kentucky.

Countee Cullen

Madison Julius Cawein

Open both on the History Atlas

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

racial world beauty death grief

Countee Cullen only

divine suffering social boys children tableau thunder lightning spring sorrow crown

Madison Julius Cawein only

recognition violence terror collective dawn nature strange wind beloved landscape moon

From the biographies

color

Countee Cullen: harlem renaissance, new york city, w.e.b. du bois, color, yet do i marvel, incident, copper sun, the ballad of the brown girl. Madison Julius Cawein: louisville, keats of kentucky, blooms of the berry, kentucky poems, edmund clarence stedman, gertrude foster mckelvey, myth and romance, intimations of the beautiful.

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.

To John Keats, Poet at Spring Time
Countee Cullen
81% beauty, world, death
Compare
In Shadow
Madison Julius Cawein
To John Keats, Poet at Spring Time
Countee Cullen
79% world
Compare
Revisited
Madison Julius Cawein
Any Human to Another
Countee Cullen
76%
Compare
Ku Klux
Madison Julius Cawein
Tableau
Countee Cullen
76% racial
Compare
Ku Klux
Madison Julius Cawein
Any Human to Another
Countee Cullen
75%
Compare
Revisited
Madison Julius Cawein
Any Human to Another
Countee Cullen
74% grief
Compare
In Shadow
Madison Julius Cawein

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1903 Publication of 'The Path of Dreams'
1903 Publication of 'The Souls of Black Folk'
1903 Wright Brothers Achieve First Powered Flight Using Wind Tunnel Research
1906 Appointment as editor of Punch
1906 Publication of The Highwayman
1906 Upton Sinclair Publishes 'The Jungle'
1907 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
1908 Discovery of Oil at Masjid i-Sulaiman in Persia

Countee Cullen

1910 Countee Cullen's Adoption by Reverend Cullen
1920 Countee Cullen's Friendship with Langston Hughes
1925 Countee Cullen Graduates from New York University
1925 Countee Cullen's First Major Poetry Collection Published
1926 Cullen joins Opportunity and begins The Dark Tower
1926 Cullen takes a master’s degree at Harvard
1927 Cullen edits the anthology Caroling Dusk
1928 Countee Cullen Marries Yolande Du Bois

Madison Julius Cawein

1882 Education at the University of Louisville
1891 Marriage to Mary L. H. Cawein
1895 First Major Publication: 'The Garden of Dreams'
1901 Publication of 'The Poetry of Madison Julius Cawein'
1902 Recognition by the Poetry Society of America
1903 Publication of 'The Black Rose'
1906 Friendship with Robert Frost
1910 Publication of 'The Poems of Madison Julius Cawein'

Emotional landscapes

Countee Cullen: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness. Madison Julius Cawein: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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