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.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this 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

William Ellery Leonard William Ellery Leonard

Poet B

James Russell Lowell James Russell Lowell
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 81% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Ellery Leonard

William Ellery Leonard

25 January 1876 – 2 May 1944 (~68)
2 live poems · English

On January 25, 1876, in the quiet town of Plainfield, New Jersey, William Ellery Channing Leonard was born into a world of literary aspiration and transcendentalist idealism. His parents, fervent admirers of the New England intellectual tradition, named their only child after William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian minister who had mentored Ralph Waldo Emerson. This choice of name proved prophetic, for Leonard would s…

“We are human from the start. We do not need to see a man die to know death. Death is born with our birth.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Confessional Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell

22 February 1819 – 12 August 1891 (~72)
3 live poems · English

In the pantheon of American letters, few figures cast as long or complex a shadow as James Russell Lowell (1819-1891). Poet, critic, editor, diplomat, and professor, Lowell embodied the intellectual ferment of nineteenth-century New England with a breadth that few of his contemporaries could match. His life spanned the tumultuous decades from the early republic through the Gilded Age, and his voice—whether wielding t…

“The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

William Ellery Leonard
James Russell Lowell
1819 1944
They overlapped for 16 years (1876–1891). When William Ellery Leonard was born, James Russell Lowell was about 57. William Ellery Leonard was about 15 when James Russell Lowell died.

On the map

About 340 km separate Plainfield, New Jersey, USA from Boston, Massachusetts, 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

social

William Ellery Leonard: plainfield, new jersey, charlotte freeman, two lives, sonnets and poems, the lynching bee and other poems, agoraphobia, madison mob, boston university. James Russell Lowell: boston, harvard college, the biglow papers, poems, the present crisis, maria white, william wetmore story, abolitionism.

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.

It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
76%
Compare
She Came and Went
James Russell Lowell
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
74%
Compare
The Beggar
James Russell Lowell
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
72% grief
Compare
The First Snow-Fall
James Russell Lowell
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard
72% life
Compare
She Came and Went
James Russell Lowell
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard
71% life
Compare
The Beggar
James Russell Lowell
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard
68%
Compare
The First Snow-Fall
James Russell Lowell

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

William Ellery Leonard: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness. James Russell Lowell: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

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