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

James Graham James Graham

Poet B

William Alexander William Alexander
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 73% Poems 79% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
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 come hither to lay down my life for the faith and cause of my king; and I am willing to die for it.”

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

William Alexander

c. 1567 – 12 February 1640 (~73)
2 live poems · English

William Alexander, later the first Earl of Stirling, was born about 1567 at Menstrie in Clackmannanshire, near Stirling, Scotland, and died in London on 12 February 1640. He belonged to that distinctive early Stuart class of men for whom poetry, government service, courtly advancement, religious reflection, and colonial ambition were not separate callings but overlapping forms of public life. In his own century he wa…

“After a great Travel both of Body and of Mind, which (since not voluntary but imposed upon me) was the more painful, by retiring for a Time where I was born being curious, as the most dainty Kind of Pleasure for such as are capable of their Delicacies to recreate myself with the Muses,—I may justly say recreate, since they create new Spirits I conversed with some of the Modern as well as with the Ancients, kindling my Fire at those Fires which do still burn out of the Ashes of ancient Authors.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

James Graham
William Alexander
1567 1650
They overlapped for 29 years (1612–1640). When James Graham was born, William Alexander was about 45. James Graham was about 28 when William Alexander died.

On the map

About 103 km separate House of Dun, Angus, Scotland from Menstrie, Stirling, Scotland. Both have ground in Alba / Scotland.

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

scottish power

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. William Alexander: menstrie, clackmannanshire, first earl of stirling, james vi and i, charles i, nova scotia schemes, the tragedie of darius, aurora.

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.

On the Faithlessness and Venality of his Times
James Graham
71% world
Compare
Aurora
William Alexander
His Metrical Prayer: before Execution
James Graham
64%
Compare
Aurora
William Alexander

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

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

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