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

Richard Aldington Richard Aldington

Poet B

Siegfried Sassoon Siegfried Sassoon
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 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington

8 July 1892 – 27 July 1962 (~70)
3 live poems · English

In the tumultuous landscape of early twentieth-century literature, few figures embodied the era's contradictions and transformations as completely as Richard Aldington. Born Edward Godfree Aldington on July 8, 1892, in Portsmouth, Hampshire, he would emerge as one of the founding voices of literary modernism, only to spend his later years railing against the very movement he helped create. His life trajectory—from pr…

“Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Sorrow, Despair
Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon

8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967 (~81)
21 live poems · English

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was born on 8 September 1886 at Weirleigh, a house near the village of Matfield in Kent, and died on 1 September 1967 at Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, a week before his eighty-first birthday. He remains one of the defining literary witnesses of the First World War: a poet whose plain speech, anger, technical control, and mordant irony broke through the patriotic consolations of his age. Yet…

“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, LGBTQ+ Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony

In time

Richard Aldington
Siegfried Sassoon
1886 1967
They overlapped for 71 years (1892–1962). When Richard Aldington was born, Siegfried Sassoon was about 6. Siegfried Sassoon was about 76 when Richard Aldington died.

On the map

About 103 km separate Portsmouth, Hampshire, England from Matfield, Kent, 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.

Shared

From the biographies

Richard Aldington: portsmouth, ezra pound, h.d., imagist movement, evening, the poplar, images of war, bombardment. Siegfried Sassoon: matfield, heytesbury house, first world war, robert graves, the daffodil murderer, the old huntsman, counter-attack and other poems, military cross.

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.

E. T.
Richard Aldington
84%
Compare
Memorial Tablet
Siegfried Sassoon
A Village
Richard Aldington
82% world
Compare
The Hawthorn Tree
Siegfried Sassoon
Bombardment
Richard Aldington
82% world, soldiers
Compare
Batallion Relief
Siegfried Sassoon
Bombardment
Richard Aldington
81% world, death
Compare
Trench Duty
Siegfried Sassoon
Bombardment
Richard Aldington
80% soldiers, death
Compare
Attack
Siegfried Sassoon
A Village
Richard Aldington
80%
Compare
Memorial Tablet
Siegfried Sassoon

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Richard Aldington: Peace, Sorrow, Despair. Siegfried Sassoon: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.

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