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

Thomas Babington Macaulay Thomas Babington Macaulay

Poet B

Thomas Campbell Thomas Campbell
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 85% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay

25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859 (~59)
2 live poems · English

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born on 25 October 1800 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire and died on 28 December 1859 at Kensington, London. He was at once a poet, essayist, parliamentarian, colonial administrator, historian, reviewer, and one of the most commanding prose stylists in nineteenth-century English. To modern readers his name often summons the grand certainty of Victorian “Whig history,” the tendency to…

“I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Thomas Campbell

Thomas Campbell

27 July 1777 – 15 June 1844 (~67)
3 live poems · English

Thomas Campbell was born on the twenty-seventh of July, 1777, in a house on Glasgow's High Street that has long since vanished beneath the changing face of the city. He was the youngest of eleven children born to Alexander Campbell, a merchant who had made and then lost a fortune trading with Virginia before the American war severed his commercial lifeline, and Margaret Campbell, whose family, like her husband's, tra…

“Now Barabbas was a publisher.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Irish Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Campbell
1777 1859
They overlapped for 45 years (1800–1844). When Thomas Babington Macaulay was born, Thomas Campbell was about 23. Thomas Babington Macaulay was about 44 when Thomas Campbell died.

On the map

About 411 km separate Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, England from Glasgow, Scotland. 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.

From the biographies

Thomas Babington Macaulay: rothley temple, leicestershire, edinburgh review, lays of ancient rome, whig history, trinity college, chancellor’s gold medal, john milton. Thomas Campbell: glasgow, argyllshire, the pleasures of hope, lord ullin's daughter, glenara, hohenlinden, the battle of the baltic, ye mariners of england.

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.

A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
77%
Compare
Hohenlinden
Thomas Campbell
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
76%
Compare
Ye Mariners of England
Thomas Campbell
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
76%
Compare
Farewell to Love
Thomas Campbell
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
74%
Compare
Ye Mariners of England
Thomas Campbell
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
67%
Compare
Hohenlinden
Thomas Campbell
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
67%
Compare
Farewell to Love
Thomas Campbell

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Babington Macaulay: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Thomas Campbell: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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