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

Charles Baudelaire Charles Baudelaire

Poet B

Alphonse de Lamartine Alphonse de Lamartine
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 76% Poems 84% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867 (~46)
4 live poems · French

Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was born in Paris on 9 April 1821 and died there on 31 August 1867, leaving a body of work comparatively small in quantity but seismic in effect. Few writers have altered the possibilities of lyric poetry so decisively. Baudelaire inherited the grandeur and rhetoric of French Romanticism, yet he redirected poetry away from nature, historical spectacle, and heroic confession toward the nervou…

“Il y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées, l’une vers Dieu, l’autre vers Satan.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Alphonse de Lamartine

Alphonse de Lamartine

21 October 1790 – 1 March 1869 (~79)
2 live poems · French

Alphonse de Lamartine was born on 21 October 1790 in Mâcon, in the Burgundy region of eastern France, and died in Paris on 1 March 1869. Poet, novelist, historian, diplomat, parliamentarian, and revolutionary statesman, he lived at the point where literary Romanticism and modern French political life came into being. Few writers have more completely embodied the nineteenth-century belief that eloquence might be a pub…

“Utopias are often only premature truths.”

Neighbourhood: Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Sensuality

In time

Charles Baudelaire
Alphonse de Lamartine
1790 1869
They overlapped for 47 years (1821–1867). When Charles Baudelaire was born, Alphonse de Lamartine was about 31. Alphonse de Lamartine was about 77 when Charles Baudelaire died.

On the map

About 340 km separate Paris, Île-de-France, France from Mâcon, Burgundy, France. Both have ground in Paris and Île-de-France.

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

french

Charles Baudelaire: paris, les fleurs du mal, jeanne duval, decadence, prose poetry, eugène delacroix, lycée louis-le-grand, mauritius. Alphonse de Lamartine: mâcon, burgundy, le lac, méditations poétiques, julie charles, voyage en orient, mary ann birch, romanticism.

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.

Correspondances
Charles Baudelaire
78% world
Compare
Le Papillon
Alphonse de Lamartine
L'Albatros
Charles Baudelaire
75% world, beauty
Compare
Le Papillon
Alphonse de Lamartine
Les Métamorphoses du vampire
Charles Baudelaire
73% beauty, desire
Compare
Le Papillon
Alphonse de Lamartine
Spleen
Charles Baudelaire
72% world
Compare
Le Papillon
Alphonse de Lamartine
Les Métamorphoses du vampire
Charles Baudelaire
70%
Compare
Le lac
Alphonse de Lamartine
Correspondances
Charles Baudelaire
70% world, nature
Compare
Le lac
Alphonse de Lamartine

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Charles Baudelaire: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Alphonse de Lamartine: Longing, Wonder, Sensuality.

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