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

Charles Dickens Charles Dickens

Poet B

Charles Lamb Charles Lamb
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% Blended 68%
Swap sides Another related pair
Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870 (~58)
1 live poem · English

Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in a modest terraced house at 1 Mile End Terrace in Landport, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England. The second of eight children born to John and Elizabeth Dickens, his arrival came during a time of naval activity and modest aspirations in a bustling port town. His father, John, a clerk in the Navy Pay Office, was a genial, improvident man whose love for literature,…

“I was not so old as you are now when I first had to win my food, and do this out of this determination, and I have never slackened in it since.”

Neighbourhood: Light Verse Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Spirituality
Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb

10 February 1775 – 27 December 1834 (~59)
5 live poems · English

Charles Lamb was born on 10 February 1775 in Crown Office Row, within London’s Inner Temple, and died on 27 December 1834 in Edmonton, then a village north of the city. He became one of the most distinctive voices in English literature not through a vast epic, a celebrated novel, or the public authority of a major poet, but through shorter forms made unexpectedly capacious: familiar essays, literary criticism, letter…

“I love to lose myself in other men's minds.”

Neighbourhood: Light Verse Poets, Love Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing

In time

Charles Dickens
Charles Lamb
1775 1870
They overlapped for 23 years (1812–1834). When Charles Dickens was born, Charles Lamb was about 37. Charles Dickens was about 22 when Charles Lamb died.

On the map

About 97 km separate Portsmouth, Hampshire, England from Crown Office Row, London, England. Both have ground in 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

Charles Dickens: portsmouth, chatham, catherine hogarth, oliver twist, the pickwick papers, sketches by boz, bleak house, great expectations. Charles Lamb: crown office row, edmonton, mary lamb, samuel taylor coleridge, christ's hospital, the superannuated man, tales from shakespeare, specimens of english dramatic 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.

The Hymn of the Wiltshire Laborers
Charles Dickens
71% divine
Compare
A Birthday Thought
Charles Lamb
The Hymn of the Wiltshire Laborers
Charles Dickens
70%
Compare
Work
Charles Lamb
The Hymn of the Wiltshire Laborers
Charles Dickens
62% children
Compare
Childhood
Charles Lamb

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Charles Dickens: Despair, Sorrow, Spirituality. Charles Lamb: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing.

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