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

Ford Madox Hueffer Ford Madox Hueffer

Poet B

Laurence Binyon Laurence Binyon
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 70% Poems 89% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Ford Madox Hueffer

Ford Madox Hueffer

17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939 (~66)
8 live poems · English

Ford Madox Hueffer, who later became Ford Madox Ford, was born on 17 December 1873 in Merton, Surrey, then a semi-rural district on the edge of London, and died on 26 June 1939 in Deauville, France. He was one of the most energetic and consequential literary figures of the transition from late Victorian culture to modernism: a novelist, poet, memoirist, critic, editor, propagandist, literary theorist, and tireless ad…

“God forbid that I should say anything really condemnatory of any book by any brother-novelist, alive or dead.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness
Laurence Binyon

Laurence Binyon

10 August 1869 – 10 March 1943 (~74)
3 live poems · English

Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…

“By such hints the imagination, being stimulated, and left to act on its own account, was roused to greater energy than by the display of forms in their completeness.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Peace

In time

Ford Madox Hueffer
Laurence Binyon
1869 1943
They overlapped for 67 years (1873–1939). When Ford Madox Hueffer was born, Laurence Binyon was about 4. Laurence Binyon was about 70 when Ford Madox Hueffer died.

On the map

About 351 km separate Merton, Surrey, England from Lancaster, England. Both have ground in England.

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

Ford Madox Hueffer: merton, ford madox brown, the brown owl, the questions at the well, the fifth queen trilogy, the good soldier, joseph conrad, the english review. Laurence Binyon: lancaster, for the fallen, cicely margaret powell, the times, british museum, trinity college, painting in the far east, the flight of the dragon.

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.

On the Hills
Ford Madox Hueffer
79% wind, world, life
Compare
O Summer sun
Laurence Binyon
Autumn Evening
Ford Madox Hueffer
79% world
Compare
The House That Was
Laurence Binyon
You Make Me Think of Lavender
Ford Madox Hueffer
78%
Compare
The House That Was
Laurence Binyon
Spring on the Woodland Path
Ford Madox Hueffer
78%
Compare
The House That Was
Laurence Binyon
Spring on the Woodland Path
Ford Madox Hueffer
77%
Compare
O Summer sun
Laurence Binyon
On the Hills
Ford Madox Hueffer
77% landscape, world
Compare
The House That Was
Laurence Binyon

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Ford Madox Hueffer: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness. Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace.

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