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

William Walsh William Walsh

Poet B

Thomas Carew Thomas Carew
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 72% Poems 87% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Walsh

William Walsh

6 October 1662 – 15 March 1708 (~46)
2 live poems · English

William Walsh was born on 6 October 1662 at Abberley Hall in Worcestershire, into a world in which inherited land, family connection, political loyalty, and literary cultivation could reinforce one another. He died on 15 March 1708, only forty-five years old, having lived as a country gentleman, Member of Parliament, court servant, poet, playwright, critic, and, perhaps most memorably, an early patron and adviser of…

“To tell anybody of their faults with a design that they should mend them is certainly the highest art of friendship; to tell them that others may avoid them is a just end of criticising; but to do it only to lessen one man's reputation, without any design of bettering another's, is what is properly called malice.”

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Light Verse Poets, Love Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Thomas Carew

Thomas Carew

1595 – 22 March 1640 (~45)
4 live poems · English

Thomas Carew, born in 1595 and buried on 22 March 1640, occupies a distinctive place in English poetry as one of the most accomplished voices of the Caroline court. He is usually grouped with the Cavalier poets, a loose modern designation for writers associated with the court of Charles I, with royalist culture, and with an ideal of elegance, loyalty, sociability, erotic wit, and cultivated pleasure. Yet Carew is mor…

“Though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seems he had not read the Ethics, which, among other Precepts of Morality, forbid Self-commendation.”

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sensuality, Tenderness

In time

William Walsh
Thomas Carew
1595 1708
Their lives did not overlap. 22 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 188 km separate Abberley, Worcestershire, England from West Wickham, Kent, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

social court culture

William Walsh: abberley hall, worcestershire, alexander pope, restoration, augustan age, a dialogue concerning women, letters and poems, william congreve. Thomas Carew: caroline court, cavalier poets, ben jonson, to his inconstant mistress, the spring, a rapture, sir dudley carleton, venice.

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.

Rivals
William Walsh
80% love
Compare
To My Inconstant Mistris
Thomas Carew
Love and Jealousy
William Walsh
76% love
Compare
Secrecy in Love Pledged
Thomas Carew
Love and Jealousy
William Walsh
76% love, desire
Compare
To My Inconstant Mistris
Thomas Carew
Rivals
William Walsh
75% love, heart
Compare
Secrecy in Love Pledged
Thomas Carew
Rivals
William Walsh
74% love
Compare
Mediocrity in Love Rejected
Thomas Carew
Rivals
William Walsh
74% love
Compare
To My Mistress Sitting by a River’s Side
Thomas Carew

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

William Walsh: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Thomas Carew: Longing, Sensuality, Tenderness.

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