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

Jessie Pope Jessie Pope

Poet B

Julia Ward Howe Julia Ward Howe
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 73% Blended 73%
Swap sides Another related pair
Jessie Pope

Jessie Pope

18 March 1868 – 14 December 1941 (~73)
2 live poems · English

Jessie Pope was born on 18 March 1868 in Leicester, England, and died on 14 December 1941, during the second year of another world war. She is remembered chiefly, and controversially, as one of the most conspicuous popular poets of British patriotic verse during the First World War. Yet to reduce her entirely to the recruitment poems that later generations have found disturbing is to overlook the long, energetic, and…

Neighbourhood: Light Verse Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Irony, Joy
Julia Ward Howe

Julia Ward Howe

27 May 1819 – 17 October 1910 (~91)
1 live poem · English

On a cold November morning in 1861, Julia Ward Howe awoke in her room at Willard's Hotel in Washington, D.C., with verses forming in her mind. She had visited Union Army camps the previous day, witnessing thousands of soldiers preparing for battle while singing "John Brown's Body." Now, in the pre-dawn darkness, words came to her with unusual clarity and force. Rising quietly so as not to disturb her sleeping childre…

“We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Political Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Spirituality

In time

Jessie Pope
Julia Ward Howe
1819 1941
They overlapped for 43 years (1868–1910). When Jessie Pope was born, Julia Ward Howe was about 49. Jessie Pope was about 42 when Julia Ward Howe died.

On the map

About 5,467 km separate Leicester, England from New York City, New York, USA. 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.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

Jessie Pope only

Julia Ward Howe only

From the biographies

women social

Jessie Pope: leicester, first world war, who's for the game?, the call, joseph pope, paper pellets, airy nothings, punch. Julia Ward Howe: washington d.c., battle hymn of the republic, john brown's body, passion flowers, samuel gridley howe, american woman suffrage association, mother's day proclamation, municipal housekeeping.

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 Call
Jessie Pope
66%
Compare
To Death
Julia Ward Howe
The Zeppelin Armada
Jessie Pope
62%
Compare
To Death
Julia Ward Howe

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Jessie Pope: Fear, Irony, Joy. Julia Ward Howe: Irony, Sorrow, Spirituality.

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