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

James Beattie James Beattie

Poet B

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth
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 74% Poems 88% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
James Beattie

James Beattie

25 October 1735 – 18 August 1803 (~68)
2 live poems · English

James Beattie, born on 25 October 1735 and dead on 18 August 1803, occupied an unusual and revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was at once a Scottish professor, a poet of landscape and sensibility, a popular moral philosopher, a Christian apologist, a music lover, a man of sociable ambition, and a bereaved father whose final years were darkened by illness and loss. In his own lifetime he was fam…

“There is not a book on earth so favorable to all the kind and to all the sublime affections, or so unfriendly to hatred and persecution, to tyranny, injustice, and every sort of malevolence, as the Gospel.”

Neighbourhood: Enlightenment Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Spirituality
William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850 (~80)
51 live poems · English

William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the northwestern corner of England, and died on 23 April 1850 at Rydal Mount in the Lake District. Few poets have altered English literary culture so thoroughly. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth helped establish the principles of British Romanticism: a new seriousness about ordinary life, a conviction that emotional experience could be…

“Work it into your thoughts, into your imagination, make it a real presence in the mind.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing

In time

James Beattie
William Wordsworth
1735 1850
They overlapped for 34 years (1770–1803). When William Wordsworth was born, James Beattie was about 35. William Wordsworth was about 33 when James Beattie died.

On the map

About 247 km separate Laurencekirk, Kincardineshire, Scotland from Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. 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

rural

James Beattie: laurencekirk, kincardineshire, the minstrel, original poems and translations, an essay on the nature and immutability of truth, samuel johnson, thomas gray, robert arbuthnot. William Wordsworth: cockermouth, lake district, samuel taylor coleridge, the prelude, lyrical ballads, annette vallon, the borderers, the ruined cottage.

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.

The Hermit
James Beattie
79%
Compare
Jones! when from Calais southward you and I
William Wordsworth
The Hermit
James Beattie
79% nature, spiritual
Compare
Bright Flower, whose home is every where!
William Wordsworth
The Hermit
James Beattie
78% spiritual
Compare
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
William Wordsworth
The Hermit
James Beattie
78% spiritual
Compare
Inland, within a hollow Vale, I stood
William Wordsworth
The Hermit
James Beattie
78%
Compare
The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

James Beattie: Sorrow, Tenderness, Spirituality. William Wordsworth: Wonder, Spirituality, Longing.

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