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

Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling

Poet B

Walt Whitman Walt Whitman
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.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 65% Poems 82% Blended 72%
Swap sides Another related pair
Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936 (~71)
17 live poems · English

Rudyard Kipling was born Joseph Rudyard Kipling on December 30, 1865, in the bustling colonial port of Bombay, British India, a city that would forever pulse through his veins like the monsoon rains and the clamor of its streets. He died on January 18, 1936, in London, England, at the age of seventy, his body laid to rest in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey after a life that spanned the height of the British Empire…

“The survivors of the debates compromised at last on the counting of heads on a division instead of breaking them.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Longing
Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

31 May 1819 – 26 March 1892 (~73)
9 live poems · English

Walt Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in a modest farmhouse in West Hills, on Long Island, New York, into a working-class family that embodied the restless energy and struggles of early America. He was the second of nine children born to Walter Whitman, a carpenter and farmer of English descent who wrestled with financial instability, and Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, whose Dutch heritage brought a touch of earthy prac…

“The largeness of the nation, however, were monstrous without a corresponding largeness and generosity of the spirit of the citizen.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing

In time

Rudyard Kipling
Walt Whitman
1819 1936
They overlapped for 28 years (1865–1892). When Rudyard Kipling was born, Walt Whitman was about 46. Rudyard Kipling was about 27 when Walt Whitman died.

On the map

About 12,498 km separate Mumbai, Maharashtra, India from West Hills, Long Island, New York, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

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

Rudyard Kipling: bombay, westminster abbey, the jungle book, just so stories, kim, gunga din, the light that failed, caroline balestier. Walt Whitman: long island, brooklyn, leaves of grass, song of myself, drum-taps, abraham lincoln, ralph waldo emerson, free verse.

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.

The Liner, She’s a Lady
Rudyard Kipling
72%
Compare
O Captain! My Captain!
Walt Whitman
An Astrologer's Song
Rudyard Kipling
72%
Compare
A Noiseless Patient Spider
Walt Whitman
The Explanation
Rudyard Kipling
72%
Compare
As if a Phantom Caress’d Me
Walt Whitman
The Explanation
Rudyard Kipling
72% death
Compare
Whispers of Heavenly Death
Walt Whitman
If-
Rudyard Kipling
72% life
Compare
The Base of All Metaphysics
Walt Whitman

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Rudyard Kipling: Irony, Sorrow, Longing. Walt Whitman: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.

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