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

Thomas Stanley Thomas Stanley

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 77% Poems 82% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Stanley

Thomas Stanley

3 September 1625 – 12 April 1678 (~53)
3 live poems · English

Thomas Stanley, born on 3 September 1625 and dead on 12 April 1678, was one of the most cultivated English writers of the seventeenth century: a lyric poet of the Cavalier age, a translator of Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish literature, an editor of Aeschylus, a patron and friend of writers, and the author of the first substantial history of philosophy written in English. His name has never carried the imm…

“Although some Grecians have challenged to their Nation the Original of Philosophy, yet the more learned of them have acknowledged it derived from the East.”

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
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…

“We here go to cause preach the Gospel where it was never heard, and not to subdue but to civilize the Savages, for their ruin could give us neither glory nor benefit.”

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

In time

Thomas Stanley
William Alexander
1567 1678
They overlapped for 16 years (1625–1640). When Thomas Stanley was born, William Alexander was about 58. Thomas Stanley was about 15 when William Alexander died.

On the map

About 525 km separate Clothall, Hertfordshire, England from Menstrie, Stirling, 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

history

Thomas Stanley: cavalier age, cumberlow, clothall, dorothy enyon, catherine killigrew, poems by thomas stanley, european literary culture, royalist culture. 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.

To Celia pleading want of Merit
Thomas Stanley
75% love, beloved
Compare
Aurora
William Alexander
The Kisse
Thomas Stanley
74% love, beloved
Compare
Aurora
William Alexander
The Relapse
Thomas Stanley
74% love, beloved
Compare
Aurora
William Alexander
The Relapse
Thomas Stanley
72% life, suffering
Compare
A Short View of the State of Man
William Alexander
The Kisse
Thomas Stanley
70%
Compare
A Short View of the State of Man
William Alexander

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Stanley: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. William Alexander: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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