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

Grace Fallow Norton Grace Fallow Norton

Poet B

Alice Corbin Alice Corbin
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 74% Poems 88% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Grace Fallow Norton

Grace Fallow Norton

29 October 1876 – 1926 (~50)
4 live poems · English

Grace Fallow Norton, born on 29 October 1876 in Northfield, Minnesota, and deceased in 1926, belongs to that large and consequential company of American poets whose work was respected in its own moment yet gradually slipped from broad public view. Her surviving reputation rests chiefly on a small body of lyric poetry, especially the 1912 collection Little Gray Songs from St. Joseph’s, a book whose title alone suggest…

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Alice Corbin

Alice Corbin

16 April 1881 – 18 July 1949 (~68)
7 live poems · English

Alice Corbin Henderson, born Alice Corbin on 16 April 1881 in St. Louis, Missouri, and dead on 18 July 1949 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, occupies an important if still insufficiently celebrated place in American literary history. She was a poet of lyrical concentration, an editor whose judgment helped define a revolutionary period in verse, a critic attentive to the relation between art and place, and a cultural organize…

“Indian symbolism, with the image as employed by the Indian, is to my mind the most fruitful and translatable contribution that Indian poetry can make to our own.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness

In time

Grace Fallow Norton
Alice Corbin
1876 1949
They overlapped for 46 years (1881–1926). When Alice Corbin was born, Grace Fallow Norton was about 5. Alice Corbin was about 45 when Grace Fallow Norton died.

On the map

About 694 km separate Northfield, Minnesota, 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

history

Grace Fallow Norton: northfield, minnesota, little gray songs from st. joseph's, smith college, christina rossetti, elizabeth barrett browning, emily dickinson, brontë sisters. Alice Corbin: st. louis, santa fe, william penhallow henderson, poetry magazine, the spinning woman of the desert, red earth: poems of new mexico, imagism, chicago modernism.

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.

Love is a Terrible Thing
Grace Fallow Norton
78% love, self
Compare
Love Me at Last
Alice Corbin
Love is a Terrible Thing
Grace Fallow Norton
77%
Compare
The Lyre
Alice Corbin
Love is a Terrible Thing
Grace Fallow Norton
76% earth
Compare
The Failing Moon
Alice Corbin
Oh, the Burden, the Burden of Love Ungiven
Grace Fallow Norton
76% love
Compare
Love Me at Last
Alice Corbin
Silver Spoils
Grace Fallow Norton
75% moon
Compare
The Lyre
Alice Corbin
Oh, the Burden, the Burden of Love Ungiven
Grace Fallow Norton
74% world, life
Compare
The Failing Moon
Alice Corbin

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Grace Fallow Norton: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Alice Corbin: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.

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