A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

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.

After the death of my mother, 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.

My wife and I are simplifying our days. The server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the quieter life we want.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

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

Cale Young Rice Cale Young Rice

Poet B

William Cullen Bryant William Cullen Bryant
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 69% Poems 88% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Cale Young Rice

Cale Young Rice

7 December 1872 – 24 January 1943 (~71)
8 live poems · English

Cale Young Rice was born on 7 December 1872 in Dixon, Kentucky, and died on 24 January 1943 in Louisville, Kentucky. During his lifetime he was a conspicuous, if never wholly central, figure in American letters: a poet of formal accomplishment, a playwright attracted to historical spectacle and moral conflict, a lecturer, traveler, and public literary presence. In the decades around 1900, when American poetry stood b…

“Most people, for example, prefer the beautiful to the ugly, the true to the false, the noble to the base.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality
William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant

3 November 1794 – 12 June 1878 (~84)
12 live poems · English

William Cullen Bryant was born on 3 November 1794 in the rural hill town of Cummington, Massachusetts, and died in New York City on 12 June 1878. During his unusually long life, he became several things at once: one of the earliest American poets to command serious respect at home and abroad, a formidable editor whose newspaper helped shape national political opinion, a translator of Homer, a civic reformer, and a pu…

“We must claim the aid of institutions of education to diffuse among the community—both those who write for the press and those who read—the exact knowledge, the habits of careful thought, the high aims, the generous motives, the principles of justice and benevolence, which alone can give dignity and usefulness to the newspaper press.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Wonder

In time

Cale Young Rice
William Cullen Bryant
1794 1943
They overlapped for 7 years (1872–1878). When Cale Young Rice was born, William Cullen Bryant was about 78. Cale Young Rice was about 6 when William Cullen Bryant died.

On the map

About 1,373 km separate Dixon, Kentucky, USA from Cummington, Massachusetts, USA. Shared ground: United States.

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

Cale Young Rice: dixon, kentucky, alice hegan rice, from dusk to dusk, many gods, a night in avignon, nirvana days, cumberland university, harvard university. William Cullen Bryant: cummington, thanatopsis, frances fairchild, new york city, the ages, romanticism, peter bryant, the fountain and other poems.

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.

Incredible!
Cale Young Rice
80% nature
Compare
I Broke the Spell
William Cullen Bryant
On the Moor
Cale Young Rice
77% death
Compare
Ay, thou art for the grave
William Cullen Bryant
Sea-Hoardings
Cale Young Rice
77% world, beauty, nature
Compare
I Broke the Spell
William Cullen Bryant
On the Moor
Cale Young Rice
77% life, grave, beauty, death
Compare
June
William Cullen Bryant
Incredible!
Cale Young Rice
75%
Compare
To the Fringed Gentian
William Cullen Bryant
Sea-Hoardings
Cale Young Rice
75% life
Compare
Song of the Stars
William Cullen Bryant

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Cale Young Rice: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality. William Cullen Bryant: Spirituality, Peace, Wonder.

Skip to main content