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

Rose Hartwick Thorpe Rose Hartwick Thorpe

Poet B

Sara Teasdale Sara Teasdale
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 90% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Rose Hartwick Thorpe

Rose Hartwick Thorpe

18 July 1850 – 19 July 1939 (~89)
4 live poems · English

In the autumn of 1867, a sixteen-year-old girl sat at her desk in Litchfield, Michigan, struggling with algebra homework. The mathematical figures before her kept blurring, replaced by a persistent phrase that demanded attention: "Curfew must not ring tonight." What began as an interruption to her studies would become one of the most recited poems of the nineteenth century, launching Rose Hartwick into unexpected lit…

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Children's Verse, Death & Mortality, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Peace, Wonder
Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale

8 August 1884 – 29 January 1933 (~49)
25 live poems · English

Sara Teasdale was born on 8 August 1884 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died there on 29 January 1933. During her lifetime she became one of the best-known American lyric poets of the early twentieth century, admired for verse that appeared effortless: brief, melodious, emotionally direct, and exquisitely shaped. Her poems spoke of love, solitude, desire, beauty, loss, the changing seasons, and death. Their clarity made…

“The perfect balance between the heart and the mind, the body and the spirit, is still to be attained.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Confessional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

Rose Hartwick Thorpe
Sara Teasdale
1850 1939
They overlapped for 50 years (1884–1933). When Sara Teasdale was born, Rose Hartwick Thorpe was about 34. Rose Hartwick Thorpe was about 83 when Sara Teasdale died.

On the map

About 480 km separate Mishawaka, Indiana, USA from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Shared ground: United States.

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

women

Rose Hartwick Thorpe: litchfield, michigan, curfew must not ring tonight, edmund c. thorpe, oliver cromwell, temperance movement, hillsdale college, fred's dark days. Sara Teasdale: st. louis, sonnets to duse, helen of troy, rivers to the sea, love songs, vachel lindsay, ernst filsinger, mary institute.

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.

Nothing Lost
Rose Hartwick Thorpe
81%
Compare
Youth and the Pilgrim
Sara Teasdale
Forgetting
Rose Hartwick Thorpe
80%
Compare
Tides
Sara Teasdale
How to Be Happy
Rose Hartwick Thorpe
80% life, beauty
Compare
There Will Come Soft Rains
Sara Teasdale
Nothing Lost
Rose Hartwick Thorpe
80% life, nature
Compare
Joy
Sara Teasdale
Nothing Lost
Rose Hartwick Thorpe
79%
Compare
The Metropolitan Tower
Sara Teasdale
How to Be Happy
Rose Hartwick Thorpe
79% self
Compare
The River
Sara Teasdale

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Rose Hartwick Thorpe: Tenderness, Peace, Wonder. Sara Teasdale: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

Skip to main content