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

Dante Gabriel Rossetti Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Poet B

Arthur O'Shaughnessy Arthur O'Shaughnessy
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 68% Poems 89% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882 (~54)
5 live poems · English

In the annals of Victorian literature and art, few figures burn as brightly or as contradictorily as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). Born Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti on May 12, 1828, in London, he would reverse his given names to honor the great Italian poet who profoundly influenced his work and worldview. A man of extraordinary artistic vision who helped revolutionize British poetry and painting, Rossetti em…

“The only thing that justifies the existence of a work of art is that it should be beautiful.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Sorrow
Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

14 March 1844 – 30 January 1881 (~37)
20 live poems · English

Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…

“I wish to provide against the series of poems which I have associated with the art of sculpture being judged from an erroneous point of view.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
1828 1882
They overlapped for 38 years (1844–1881). When Arthur O'Shaughnessy was born, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was about 16. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was about 53 when Arthur O'Shaughnessy died.

On the map

About 11 km separate 38 Charlotte Street, London, England from Ealing, 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.

Shared

From the biographies

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: london, pre-raphaelite brotherhood, the blessed damozel, elizabeth siddal, highgate cemetery, the house of life, john everett millais, william holman hunt. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: victorian london, irish descent, epic of women, lays of france, dante gabriel rossetti, pre-raphaelite movement, albert günther, eleanor marston.

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 Woodspurge
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
81% world
Compare
When the Rose came I loved the Rose
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Even So
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
80% world, love
Compare
When the Rose came I loved the Rose
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Even So
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
79% love
Compare
If She But Knew
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Even So
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
78% memory, love
Compare
Love After Death
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
The Woodspurge
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
78% grief, memory
Compare
A Life-Tomb
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
The Woodspurge
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
77%
Compare
The Cypress
Arthur O'Shaughnessy

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Wonder, Tenderness, Sorrow. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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