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

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Poet B

Humbert Wolfe Humbert Wolfe
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 71% Poems 89% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

29 August 1809 – 7 October 1894 (~85)
16 live poems · English

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., born 29 August 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dead 7 October 1894 in Boston, was one of the most recognizably versatile figures in nineteenth-century American culture: physician, medical reformer, anatomist, professor, poet, novelist, essayist, conversational satirist, and public intellectual. He was often called the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” after his most celebrated prose…

“I am really very proud of it, and keep it displayed in my library, where it is a great attraction.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
Humbert Wolfe

Humbert Wolfe

5 January 1885 – 5 January 1940 (~55)
3 live poems · English

On the fifth of January 1885, in the bustling commercial heart of Milan, a child was born who would become one of Britain's most popular poets of the 1920s, yet whose name today is remembered primarily for a single, sardonic epigram. Humbert Wolfe was born as Umberto Wolff in Milan, Italy, to Martin Wolff, a German Jewish merchant, and Consuela Terraccini, an Italian Jew. This dual heritage, straddling Germanic and M…

“You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow

In time

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Humbert Wolfe
1809 1940
They overlapped for 10 years (1885–1894). When Humbert Wolfe was born, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was about 76. Humbert Wolfe was about 9 when Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. died.

On the map

About 6,159 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from Milan, Lombardy, Italy. 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

social

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: cambridge, massachusetts, boston, old ironsides, the contagiousness of puerperal fever, the autocrat of the breakfast-table, amelia lee jackson, harvard college, hasty pudding club. Humbert Wolfe: milan, bradford, wadham college, london sonnets, lampoons, requiem, requiem: the soldier, kensington gardens.

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.

Strange! that one lightly whispered tone
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
81% love
Compare
Love
Humbert Wolfe
The Voiceless
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
78%
Compare
Love
Humbert Wolfe
Departed Days
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
77% loss
Compare
Love
Humbert Wolfe
Departed Days
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
77%
Compare
The Song
Humbert Wolfe
Tartarus
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
77%
Compare
The Song
Humbert Wolfe
The Voiceless
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
76% suffering
Compare
Iliad
Humbert Wolfe

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Humbert Wolfe: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.

Skip to main content