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

John Keats John Keats

Poet B

Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Lord Tennyson
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 92% Blended 83%
Swap sides Another related pair
John Keats

John Keats

31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821 (~26)
23 live poems · English

John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the first surviving child of Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings Keats. Though later admirers often imagined him as the archetypal fragile Romantic poet, set apart from ordinary life by genius and suffering, his origins were practical, urban, and socially modest. His father managed the Swan and Hoop livery stable at Moorgate, owned by Frances’s father, John Jennings. Ke…

“I am ambitious of doing the world some good: if I should be spared that may be the work of maturer years.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Alfred Lord Tennyson

6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892 (~83)
27 live poems · English

Alfred Tennyson, later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, England, and died on 6 October 1892 at Lurgashall in Sussex. During his long life he became the defining poetic voice of the Victorian age: at once a public laureate who wrote for national occasions and a private, searching poet whose work returned obsessively to bereavement, desire, religious uncertainty, mem…

“Beware of breaking up the soil of any Faith, when you have no better seed to sow.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow

In time

John Keats
Alfred Lord Tennyson
1795 1892
They overlapped for 13 years (1809–1821). When Alfred Lord Tennyson was born, John Keats was about 14. Alfred Lord Tennyson was about 12 when John Keats died.

On the map

About 192 km separate London, England from Somersby, Lincolnshire, 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

John Keats: london, thomas keats, frances keats, charles cowden clarke, leigh hunt, endymion, ode to a nightingale, the eve of st. agnes. Alfred Lord Tennyson: somersby, lincolnshire, victorian age, arthur henry hallam, in memoriam, the lady of shalott, the lotos-eaters, ulysses.

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.

La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad
John Keats
82% beauty, love
Compare
The Beggar Maid
Alfred Lord Tennyson
To Autumn
John Keats
82% life
Compare
Tears, Idle Tears
Alfred Lord Tennyson
In a drear-nighted December
John Keats
82% memory
Compare
Tears, Idle Tears
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art
John Keats
81% beloved, desire, life, body
Compare
The Miller’s Daughter
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The day is gone
John Keats
81% love
Compare
Tears, Idle Tears
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats
80% nature, world
Compare
The Dying Swan
Alfred Lord Tennyson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

John Keats: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Alfred Lord Tennyson: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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