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 Cartwright William Cartwright

Poet B

James Graham James Graham
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.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 68% Poems 78% Blended 73%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Cartwright

William Cartwright

1 September 1611 – 29 November 1643 (~32)
3 live poems · English

William Cartwright was born on 1 September 1611 at Northway, near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, and died at Oxford on 29 November 1643. His life was brief even by the precarious standards of the seventeenth century, but it was remarkably crowded: he was a poet, playwright, scholar, university teacher, Anglican clergyman, royalist, and celebrated preacher. To his contemporaries he seemed a figure of unusual promise,…

“it was his happiness that he neither heard nor read any thing vulgar, weak or raw, till his mind was fixed to notions exact as reason and as high as fancy”

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
James Graham

James Graham

1612 – 21 May 1650 (~38)
2 live poems · English

James Graham, first Marquess of Montrose, was born in 1612 and died on 21 May 1650. He occupies an unusual place in British literary and political history: a Scottish aristocrat whose short life contained religious revolution, civil war, spectacular military success, exile, defeat, and execution; a Royalist commander remembered as “the Great Montrose”; and a poet whose surviving verses, though few, have remained memo…

“I am very willing to lay down my life, and I bless God that I have a clear conscience before him.”

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Love Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Fear

In time

William Cartwright
James Graham
1611 1650
They overlapped for 32 years (1612–1643). When James Graham was born, William Cartwright was about 1. James Graham was about 31 when William Cartwright died.

On the map

About 526 km separate Northway, Gloucestershire, England from House of Dun, Angus, 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.

Shared

From the biographies

royalist

William Cartwright: northway, tewkesbury, oxford, cirencester, westminster school, christ church, the royal slave, anglican clergyman. James Graham: scottish aristocrat, covenanter, royalist commander, the great montrose, my dear and only love, wars of the three kingdoms, thirty years' war, magdalen carnegie.

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.

Falsehood
William Cartwright
65%
Compare
His Metrical Prayer: before Execution
James Graham
The Gnat
William Cartwright
63%
Compare
His Metrical Prayer: before Execution
James Graham

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

William Cartwright: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. James Graham: Sorrow, Despair, Fear.

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