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 Allingham William Allingham

Poet B

Richard Le Gallienne Richard Le Gallienne
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 77% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Allingham

William Allingham

19 March 1824 – 18 November 1889 (~65)
1 live poem · English

William Allingham was born on 19 March 1824 in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, a small market town at the mouth of the River Erne, and died on 18 November 1889 at Hampstead in London. His literary reputation rests above all on a handful of extraordinarily durable lyrics: poems of rivers, birds, childhood, fairy lore, village life, and remembered Irish landscapes. Yet his career was broader and more complicated than the…

“I have been an Official all my life, without the least turn for it. I never could attain a true official manner, which is highly artificial and handles trifles with ludicrously disproportionate gravity.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Sorrow, Fear
Richard Le Gallienne

Richard Le Gallienne

20 January 1866 – 15 September 1947 (~81)
1 live poem · English

Richard Le Gallienne, born Richard Thomas Gallienne in Liverpool on 20 January 1866 and dead at Menton, France, on 15 September 1947, lived long enough to become both a participant in and a chronicler of several literary ages. He began as an ambitious young poet of the late Victorian aesthetic movement, came to public notice amid the bright notoriety of the 1890s, crossed the Atlantic to remake himself for an America…

“Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Love Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing

In time

William Allingham
Richard Le Gallienne
1824 1947
They overlapped for 24 years (1866–1889). When Richard Le Gallienne was born, William Allingham was about 42. Richard Le Gallienne was about 23 when William Allingham died.

On the map

About 366 km separate Ballyshannon, County Donegal, Ireland from Liverpool, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

William Allingham only

Richard Le Gallienne only

From the biographies

london

William Allingham: ballyshannon, county donegal, the faeries, laurence bloomfield in ireland, the winding banks of erne, victorian britain, pre-raphaelite circle, dante gabriel rossetti. Richard Le Gallienne: liverpool, menton, oscar wilde, the yellow book, aesthetic movement, my ladies’ sonnets, the book-bills of narcissus, the quest of the golden girl.

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.

The Fairies
William Allingham
71%
Compare
Regret
Richard Le Gallienne

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

William Allingham: Wonder, Sorrow, Fear. Richard Le Gallienne: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.

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