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 Congreve William Congreve

Poet B

Ben Jonson Ben Jonson
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 75% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Congreve

William Congreve

24 January 1670 – 19 January 1729 (~59)
1 live poem · English

William Congreve, born on 24 January 1670 and dead on 19 January 1729, occupies a singular place in English literary history: he was the most polished comic dramatist of the Restoration and one of the crucial artists through whom the exuberant theatre of the late seventeenth century became the poised, urbane literature of the Augustan age. His surviving dramatic career was astonishingly brief. Between 1693 and 1700 h…

“I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.”

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Light Verse Poets, Restoration Poets, Satirical Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness
Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson

c. 11 June 1572 – 6 August 1637 (~65)
5 live poems · English

Ben Jonson, baptized on 11 June 1572 and probably born on or very near that date, entered the world in Westminster at a moment when London’s theatrical culture was beginning to assume the force and richness that would make the English Renaissance famous. He died on 6 August 1637, having become, in the course of sixty-five turbulent years, England’s most formidable classical dramatist, one of its finest lyric poets, a…

“Words are the only things that live forever.”

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality

In time

William Congreve
Ben Jonson
1572 1729
Their lives did not overlap. 33 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 285 km separate Bardsey, near Leeds, Yorkshire, England from Westminster, London, England. Both have ground in London.

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

comedy social play

William Congreve: bardsey, youghal, carrickfergus, anglo-irish protestant, jonathan swift, trinity college dublin, the old bachelor, the double-dealer. Ben Jonson: westminster, william camden, on my first son, on my first daughter, every man in his humour, the isle of dogs, gabriel spencer, war of the theatres.

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.

False though She be
William Congreve
77% love
Compare
To Celia
Ben Jonson
False though She be
William Congreve
72%
Compare
A Hymne to God the Father
Ben Jonson
False though She be
William Congreve
72% power
Compare
That Women Are but Mens Shaddowes
Ben Jonson
False though She be
William Congreve
67% love, power
Compare
The Dreame
Ben Jonson
False though She be
William Congreve
65%
Compare
Begging Another
Ben Jonson

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

William Congreve: Sorrow, Longing, Tenderness. Ben Jonson: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality.

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