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

Robert Nichols Robert Nichols
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 76% Poems 81% Blended 78%
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…

“I merely lacked gullibility, and saw, at the first glance, the whole unmistakable humbug and insincerity of the Literary Life.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Robert Nichols

Robert Nichols

6 September 1893 – 17 December 1944 (~51)
5 live poems · English

In the pantheon of early twentieth-century British poetry, certain voices echo through the decades with enduring resonance, while others fade into the margins of literary history despite their once-prominent positions. Robert Malise Bowyer Nichols belongs to this latter category—a poet whose name once commanded respect in literary circles, whose work appeared alongside that of his more famous contemporaries, yet whos…

“They are gathered together because the book affords an opportunity to record appeals which are—save in one or two cases—to scarcely tangible emotions: those emotions which float across the mind like Coleridge's cloud, thin and pale and very high, and are of import to the very few.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

Robert Williams Buchanan
Robert Nichols
1841 1944
They overlapped for 9 years (1893–1901). When Robert Nichols was born, Robert Williams Buchanan was about 52. Robert Nichols was about 8 when Robert Williams Buchanan died.

On the map

About 269 km separate Caverswall, Staffordshire, England from Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England. Both have ground in England.

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

Robert Williams Buchanan: caverswall, david gray, cornhill magazine, a poet's sketch book, undertones, idylls and legends of inverburn, london poems, the little milliner. Robert Nichols: shanklin, isle of wight, john bowyer buchanan nichols, mary catherine nichols, invocation: war poems and others, aurelia and other poems, w.b. yeats, georgian poets.

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
77% world
Compare
Alone
Robert Nichols
Coruisk
Robert Williams Buchanan
73%
Compare
Crisis
Robert Nichols
Coruisk
Robert Williams Buchanan
71%
Compare
Ask not how it came I died
Robert Nichols
Coruisk
Robert Williams Buchanan
70% world
Compare
Nearer
Robert Nichols
The Wedding of Shon MacLean
Robert Williams Buchanan
66%
Compare
Crisis
Robert Nichols
The Ballad of Judas Iscariot
Robert Williams Buchanan
64% world
Compare
Alone
Robert Nichols

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. Robert Nichols: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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