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

Robert Williams Buchanan Robert Williams Buchanan

Poet B

James Thomson James Thomson
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 78% Poems 82% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Robert Williams Buchanan

Robert Williams Buchanan

18 August 1841 – 10 June 1901 (~60)
3 live poems · English

On a warm August morning in 1841, in the quiet Staffordshire village of Caverswall, Robert Williams Buchanan was born on August 18. He entered a world already marked by ideological fervor and social upheaval, for his father, Robert Buchanan senior, was no ordinary parent but a passionate advocate of Robert Owen's socialist schemes, traveling the country as an itinerant lecturer preaching cooperation and radical socia…

“The poet is one who sees life newly, assimilates it emotionally, and contrives to utter it musically.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
James Thomson

James Thomson

23 November 1834 – 3 June 1882 (~48)
2 live poems · English

In the pantheon of Victorian poetry, few figures cast as long and dark a shadow as James Thomson, who wrote under the mysterious initials "B.V." Born on November 23, 1834, in Port Glasgow, Scotland, Thomson would become one of the most compelling and tragic voices of his generation, a poet whose work plumbed the depths of human despair while achieving moments of transcendent beauty. His life, marked by profound loss,…

“Hope is the breath in the nostrils of happiness, when that goes this dies.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony

In time

Robert Williams Buchanan
James Thomson
1834 1901
They overlapped for 42 years (1841–1882). When Robert Williams Buchanan was born, James Thomson was about 7. Robert Williams Buchanan was about 41 when James Thomson died.

On the map

About 369 km separate Caverswall, Staffordshire, England from Port Glasgow, Scotland. Both have ground in England and London.

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

london

Robert Williams Buchanan: caverswall, david gray, cornhill magazine, a poet's sketch book, undertones, idylls and legends of inverburn, london poems, the little milliner. James Thomson: port glasgow, b.v., the city of dreadful night, charles bradlaugh, george meredith, the doom of a city, royal military academy, philosophical skepticism.

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.

Coruisk
Robert Williams Buchanan
74%
Compare
The Fire That Filled My Heart of Old
James Thomson
The Ballad of Judas Iscariot
Robert Williams Buchanan
70%
Compare
Virtue and Vice
James Thomson
The Wedding of Shon MacLean
Robert Williams Buchanan
66%
Compare
Virtue and Vice
James Thomson
The Wedding of Shon MacLean
Robert Williams Buchanan
64%
Compare
The Fire That Filled My Heart of Old
James Thomson
Coruisk
Robert Williams Buchanan
64%
Compare
Virtue and Vice
James Thomson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Robert Williams Buchanan: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. James Thomson: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.

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