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

Charles Stuart Calverley Charles Stuart Calverley

Poet B

G. K. Chesterton G. K. Chesterton
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 72% Poems 80% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
Charles Stuart Calverley

Charles Stuart Calverley

22 December 1831 – 17 February 1884 (~53)
2 live poems · English

Charles Stuart Calverley burst onto the Victorian literary scene like a sudden shaft of sunlight piercing the solemn clouds of high-minded poetry. Born in an age that prized ponderous epics and moralizing odes, he carved out a niche as the undisputed master of light verse, parody, and scholarly wit. His poems danced with verbal dexterity, skewering pretension while celebrating the simple joys of tobacco, beer, and sc…

“They hunted the bear on the voluptuous parterre, the trim garden and expensive pleasure-ground, where effeminacy was wont to saunter or indolence to loll.”

Neighbourhood: Light Verse Poets, Love Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Joy, Tenderness
G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton

29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936 (~62)
13 live poems · English

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on 29 May 1874 at Campden Hill in Kensington, London, into a comfortable middle-class household whose mixture of security, imagination, and mild religious seriousness helped to form one of the most exuberant literary personalities of the twentieth century. He died on 14 June 1936 at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, after a career that made him internationally recognizable as an essayis…

“The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Hymn Writers, Light Verse Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Political Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing

In time

Charles Stuart Calverley
G. K. Chesterton
1831 1936
They overlapped for 11 years (1874–1884). When G. K. Chesterton was born, Charles Stuart Calverley was about 43. G. K. Chesterton was about 10 when Charles Stuart Calverley died.

On the map

About 169 km separate Martley, Worcestershire, England from Kensington, London, England. Both have ground in London.

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

Charles Stuart Calverley: martley, worcestershire, harrow school, balliol college, christ's college, ode to tobacco, examination paper on pickwick, university school of humour. G. K. Chesterton: campden hill, beaconsfield, father brown, orthodoxy, the wild knight, frances blogg, edmund clerihew bentley, clerihew.

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.

Striking
Charles Stuart Calverley
73%
Compare
The Kingdom of Heaven
G. K. Chesterton
A B C
Charles Stuart Calverley
72%
Compare
The Great Minimum
G. K. Chesterton
A B C
Charles Stuart Calverley
72% light, life
Compare
Ballad of the Sun
G. K. Chesterton
A B C
Charles Stuart Calverley
70%
Compare
The Beatific Vision
G. K. Chesterton
A B C
Charles Stuart Calverley
70%
Compare
Love's Trappist
G. K. Chesterton
Striking
Charles Stuart Calverley
69%
Compare
Love's Trappist
G. K. Chesterton

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Charles Stuart Calverley: Irony, Joy, Tenderness. G. K. Chesterton: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing.

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