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

Howard Phillips Lovecraft Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Poet B

A.E.Housman A.E.Housman
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 66% Poems 84% Blended 74%
Swap sides Another related pair
Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

20 August 1890 – 15 March 1937 (~47)
2 live poems · English

In the shadowed streets of Providence, Rhode Island, where colonial spires pierced the New England sky like fingers reaching toward indifferent stars, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890. This unassuming city, with its cobblestone lanes and whispering ghosts of history, would become both cradle and canvas for a man whose poetry and prose would forever alter the landscape of American literature. Love…

“Suggestion is very powerful in this field, especially when mental qualities are to be delineated.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Fear
Listen Timeline Affinities
A.E.Housman

A.E.Housman

26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936 (~77)
19 live poems · English

Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 at Valley House, Fockbury, a small hamlet near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, England, and died in Cambridge on 30 April 1936. He became, by way of an unusually divided life, both one of the most recognizable lyric poets in English and one of the most formidable classical scholars of his generation. The apparent contrast between these identities has long fascinated reade…

“Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Howard Phillips Lovecraft
A.E.Housman
1859 1937
They overlapped for 47 years (1890–1936). When Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born, A.E.Housman was about 31. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was about 46 when A.E.Housman died.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft in history A.E.Housman in history Years they were given

On the map

About 5,168 km separate Providence, Rhode Island, USA from Fockbury, Worcestershire, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

A.E.Housman

Open both on the History Atlas

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

dead world death life

Howard Phillips Lovecraft only

despair gothic oblivion madness philosophical suburb landscape cosmic supernatural past village ordinary

A.E.Housman only

love beauty self nature mortality heart desire pastoral soldier memory condemned existence

From the biographies

Howard Phillips Lovecraft: providence, rhode island, cosmic horror, whipple van buren phillips, the crime of the century, to a youth, fungi from yuggoth, sonia haft greene. A.E.Housman: fockbury, bromsgrove, moses jackson, a shropshire lad, loveliest of trees, to an athlete dying young, when i was one-and-twenty, classical scholar.

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.

Despair
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
83% despair
Compare
Good creatures
A.E.Housman
Despair
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
79%
Compare
Be still, my soul
A.E.Housman
Despair
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
78%
Compare
Now hollow fires burn out to black
A.E.Housman
Hallowe'en in a Suburb
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
77% world, life
Compare
Good creatures
A.E.Housman
Despair
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
76%
Compare
Oh, when I was in love with you
A.E.Housman
Despair
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
76%
Compare
Oh fair enough are sky and plain
A.E.Housman

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1891 Conversion to Roman Catholicism
1892 Opening of Ellis Island
1892 Valéry undergoes the Genoa crisis
1893 Co-founding of the Gaelic League
1893 Delivery of 'The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland' Speech
1893 Publication of 'The Hound of Heaven'
1894 Death of Robert Louis Stevenson
1894 Valéry begins his lifelong notebooks

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

1913 Lovecraft's Marriage to Sonia H. Greene
1921 Return to Providence
1926 Publication of 'The Outsider'
1931 Involvement with the Lovecraft Circle
1931 Publication of 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'
1936 Final Years and Declining Health
1936 Publication of 'At the Mountains of Madness'
1938 Posthumous Recognition

A.E.Housman

1877 Education at St John's College, Oxford
1877 Unrequited Love for Moses Jackson
1892 Appointment as Professor of Latin at University College London
1894 Death of his Father
1896 Publication of 'A Shropshire Lad'
1905 Appointment as Professor of Latin at University College London
1917 Death of Edward Thomas
1922 Publication of 'Last Poems'

Emotional landscapes

Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Despair, Sorrow, Fear. A.E.Housman: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

Skip to main content