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

Paul Éluard Paul Éluard

Poet B

T. S. Eliot T. S. Eliot
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 70% Blended 70%
Swap sides Another related pair
Paul Éluard

Paul Éluard

14 December 1895 – 18 November 1952 (~57)
1 live poem · French

Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel on 14 December 1895 in Saint-Denis, near Paris, became one of the defining French poets of the twentieth century. His career crossed some of the century’s most turbulent landscapes: the First World War, the invention of Dada and Surrealism, the rise of fascism, the German occupation of France, the liberation, and the ideological divisions of the Cold War. In each period, Él…

“We need few words to express what is essential; we need all the words to make it real.”

Neighbourhood: French Symbolists, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Fear
Listen Timeline Affinities
T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965 (~77)
14 live poems · English

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…

“A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Paul Éluard
T. S. Eliot
1888 1965
They overlapped for 58 years (1895–1952). When Paul Éluard was born, T. S. Eliot was about 7. T. S. Eliot was about 64 when Paul Éluard died.
Paul Éluard in history T. S. Eliot in history Years they were given

On the map

About 7,049 km separate Saint-Denis, Île-de-France, France from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Paul Éluard

T. S. Eliot

Open both on the History Atlas

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

death life

Paul Éluard only

éluard body smile avis condemned

T. S. Eliot only

world spiritual memory urban fragmented despair modernity social consciousness history philosophical self

From the biographies

Paul Éluard: saint-denis, gala, surrealism, dada, first world war, tuberculosis, capitale de la douleur, la vie immédiate. T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne.

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.

Avis
Paul Éluard
76% death
Compare
The Wind Sprang up at Four O'clock
T. S. Eliot
Avis
Paul Éluard
75%
Compare
Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
Avis
Paul Éluard
74% death
Compare
Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears
T. S. Eliot
Avis
Paul Éluard
73%
Compare
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
Avis
Paul Éluard
72%
Compare
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
T. S. Eliot
Avis
Paul Éluard
71%
Compare
Lines for an Old Man
T. S. Eliot

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1895 Publication of 'The Red Badge of Courage'
1895 The X-Ray Discovery
1896 Publication of 'A Shropshire Lad'
1896 Publication of 'The Story of the Other Wise Man'
1897 J.J. Thomson discovers the electron at the Cavendish Laboratory
1897 Ronald Ross Demonstrates Mosquito Transmission of Malaria
1898 Crane's Experience in the Spanish-American War
1901 Establishment of the Nobel Prizes

Paul Éluard

1913 Meeting Gala in the Sanatorium
1917 Marriage to Gala
1924 Involvement with the Surrealist Movement
1926 First Publication of 'Capitale de la Douleur'
1934 Second Marriage to Nush
1936 Publication of 'Les Yeux Fertiles'
1940 Political Activism during WWII
1942 Publication of 'Poésie et Vérité'

T. S. Eliot

1906 Eliot's Education at Harvard
1915 Publication of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'
1917 Publication of 'Prufrock and Other Observations'
1922 Publication of 'The Waste Land'
1925 Publication of 'The Hollow Men'
1927 Conversion to Anglicanism
1933 Separation from Vivienne Haigh-Wood
1943 Publication of 'Four Quartets'

Emotional landscapes

Paul Éluard: Despair, Sorrow, Fear. T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.

Skip to main content