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

Gerald Griffin Gerald Griffin

Poet B

Charles Whitehead Charles Whitehead
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 69% Blended 69%
Swap sides Another related pair
Gerald Griffin

Gerald Griffin

12 December 1803 – 12 June 1840 (~37)
1 live poem · English

Gerald Griffin was born in Limerick on 12 December 1803 and died in Cork on 12 June 1840, before his thirty-seventh birthday. His life was brief, restless, and divided between two vocations that seemed, in his own mind, increasingly irreconcilable: literature and religious service. In less than two decades of serious writing, he became one of the most distinctive Irish novelists of the early nineteenth century, a poe…

“I often long to see her, that I often think of her with gratitude and affection, and that the longer I live the deeper do I value her early love and care.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder
Listen Timeline Affinities
Charles Whitehead

Charles Whitehead

4 October 1804 – 5 July 1862 (~58)
2 live poems · English

Charles Whitehead was born in London on 4 October 1804, at a time when English literary culture was being reshaped by the afterglow of Romanticism, the rise of popular periodicals, and the expanding commercial possibilities of print. He was the eldest son of a prosperous wine merchant, and his childhood appears to have been materially secure. This fact makes the contrast with his final years especially stark: he died…

Neighbourhood: Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Gerald Griffin
Charles Whitehead
1803 1862
They overlapped for 37 years (1804–1840). When Charles Whitehead was born, Gerald Griffin was about 1. Charles Whitehead was about 36 when Gerald Griffin died.
Gerald Griffin in history Charles Whitehead in history Years they were given

On the map

About 595 km separate Limerick, Ireland from London, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Gerald Griffin

Charles Whitehead

Open both on the History Atlas

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.

Gerald Griffin only

sleep griffin world irish fairies fairy imaginative sounds

Charles Whitehead only

life whitehead lamp light mind flame room heart hell breath soul spiritual

From the biographies

social fiction

Gerald Griffin: limerick, cork, christian brothers, the collegians, ellen hanley, john scanlan, hardress cregan, eily o'connor. Charles Whitehead: london, melbourne hospital, the solitary, charles dickens, mary ann loomes, the autobiography of jack ketch, the cavalier, richard savage.

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.

Nocturne
Gerald Griffin
68%
Compare
The Lamp
Charles Whitehead
Nocturne
Gerald Griffin
66%
Compare
Oh! better not to live
Charles Whitehead

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1805 HMS Victory Leads Britain at Trafalgar
1812 French Invasion of Russia Begins
1812 Publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Cantos I and II
1812 The Harrowing Retreat from Moscow
1813 Imprisonment in Surrey Gaol
1815 1815 Tambora Eruption
1816 Byron and Lady Byron Separate
1816 The Year Without a Summer

Gerald Griffin

1823 Gerald Griffin's Move to London
1829 Publication of 'The Collegians'
1835 Publication of 'The Tales of the Munster Festivals'
1836 Return to Ireland
1837 Publication of 'The Invasion'
1838 Appointment as a Teacher

Charles Whitehead

1820 Influence of the Romantic Movement
1830 Friendship with Charles Dickens
1831 Publication of The Solitary
1853 Relocation to Australia
1857 Publication of The Last of the Fairies
1859 Death of his wife, Mary Ann Whitehead
1860 Publication of The Poetical Works of Charles Whitehead
1862 Final illness and hospitalization

Emotional landscapes

Gerald Griffin: Peace, Tenderness, Wonder. Charles Whitehead: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.

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