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

Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Lord Tennyson

Poet B

John Greenleaf Whittier John Greenleaf Whittier
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 72% Poems 83% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Alfred Lord Tennyson

6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892 (~83)
27 live poems · English

Alfred Tennyson, later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, England, and died on 6 October 1892 at Lurgashall in Sussex. During his long life he became the defining poetic voice of the Victorian age: at once a public laureate who wrote for national occasions and a private, searching poet whose work returned obsessively to bereavement, desire, religious uncertainty, mem…

“There is no happiness in having and no happiness in getting, but only in giving.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow
John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier

17 December 1807 – 7 September 1892 (~85)
2 live poems · English

John Greenleaf Whittier was born on 17 December 1807 on his family’s farm in the East Parish of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and died on 7 September 1892 in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. During his long life, the United States changed from a young republic into an industrial and continental power scarred by civil war, and Whittier became one of the most widely read literary witnesses to that transformation. He was a poe…

“Better heresy of doctrine than heresy of heart.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Hymn Writers, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

Alfred Lord Tennyson
John Greenleaf Whittier
1807 1892
They overlapped for 84 years (1809–1892). When Alfred Lord Tennyson was born, John Greenleaf Whittier was about 2.

On the map

About 5,187 km separate Somersby, Lincolnshire, England from Haverhill, Massachusetts, United States. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

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

Alfred Lord Tennyson: somersby, lincolnshire, victorian age, arthur henry hallam, in memoriam, the lady of shalott, the lotos-eaters, ulysses. John Greenleaf Whittier: haverhill, new hampshire, william lloyd garrison, american anti-slavery society, quaker, legends of new england, poems written during the progress of the abolition question, ichabod.

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.

Come into the garden, Maud
Alfred Lord Tennyson
77%
Compare
Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
The Islet
Alfred Lord Tennyson
74% life
Compare
Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
Tears, Idle Tears
Alfred Lord Tennyson
73% love, memory, life
Compare
In School-Days
John Greenleaf Whittier
Tears, Idle Tears
Alfred Lord Tennyson
73% life
Compare
Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
The Deserted House
Alfred Lord Tennyson
72% life
Compare
Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
The Merman
Alfred Lord Tennyson
72% life
Compare
Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Alfred Lord Tennyson: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow. John Greenleaf Whittier: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

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