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

Thomas Parnell Thomas Parnell

Poet B

Alexander Pope Alexander Pope
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 77% Poems 81% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Parnell

Thomas Parnell

11 September 1679 – 24 October 1718 (~39)
2 live poems · English

Thomas Parnell, born in Dublin on 11 September 1679 and dead at Chester, England, on 24 October 1718, occupies a distinctive position in the literary culture of the early eighteenth century. He was an Anglo-Irish clergyman, poet, translator, essayist, and valued member of the brilliant circle that included Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot. His name is often introduced through those greater…

“What would you have otherwise from ignorance, envy, or those tempers which vie with you in your own way?”

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Irish Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality
Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744 (~56)
6 live poems · English

Alexander Pope, born on 21 May 1688 and dead on 30 May 1744, was the supreme English poet of the Augustan age and one of the most technically accomplished writers in the language. His verse made the heroic couplet seem at once inevitable, conversational, polished, and inexhaustibly flexible. In his best work, a pair of rhyming pentameter lines can carry an argument, a joke, a moral judgment, a portrait, a burst of in…

“The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth; and the present spirit of the world is such, that to attempt to serve it one must have the constancy of a martyr.”

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder

In time

Thomas Parnell
Alexander Pope
1679 1744
They overlapped for 31 years (1688–1718). When Alexander Pope was born, Thomas Parnell was about 9. Alexander Pope was about 30 when Thomas Parnell died.

On the map

About 465 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Plough Court, Lombard Street, London, 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

scriblerus club

Thomas Parnell: chester, anglo-irish, trinity college dublin, the hermit, a night-piece on death, scriblerus club, anne minchin, robert harley. Alexander Pope: augustan age, heroic couplet, an essay on criticism, the rape of the lock, twickenham, john dryden, scriblerus club, spinal tuberculosis.

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.

My days have been so wondrous free
Thomas Parnell
72% desire
Compare
Ode on Solitude
Alexander Pope
When thy beauty appears
Thomas Parnell
70% life
Compare
The Happy Life of a Country Parson
Alexander Pope
When thy beauty appears
Thomas Parnell
69%
Compare
Sound and Sense
Alexander Pope

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Parnell: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality. Alexander Pope: Joy, Peace, Wonder.

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