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

Christopher Marlowe Christopher Marlowe

Poet B

Edmund Spenser Edmund Spenser
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 67% Poems 83% Blended 74%
Swap sides Another related pair
Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe

26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593 (~29)
2 live poems · English

In the annals of English literature, few figures burn as brightly and briefly as Christopher Marlowe. Born in the same year as William Shakespeare, 1564, Marlowe’s life was a meteoric flash that illuminated the Elizabethan stage before being extinguished in a tavern brawl at the age of twenty-nine. Yet, in those scant three decades, he fundamentally altered the trajectory of English drama, liberating it from the stif…

“O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder
Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser

c. 1552 – 13 January 1599 (~47)
4 live poems · English

Edmund Spenser, born about 1552 and dead on 13 January 1599, was the most ambitious English poet of the later Elizabethan age and one of the chief architects of the English literary canon. His achievement rests above all on The Faerie Queene, the vast unfinished romance-epic through which he attempted to give Protestant England a national mythology, a moral education, and a poetic language equal to those of classical…

“To some I know this method will seem displeasing, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large.”

Neighbourhood: Elizabethan Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness

In time

Christopher Marlowe
Edmund Spenser
1552 1599
They overlapped for 30 years (1564–1593). When Christopher Marlowe was born, Edmund Spenser was about 12. Edmund Spenser was about 41 when Christopher Marlowe died.

On the map

About 88 km separate Canterbury, Kent, England from 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

Christopher Marlowe: canterbury, tamburlaine, doctor faustus, edward ii, the jew of malta, hero and leander, archbishop matthew parker, king's school. Edmund Spenser: the faerie queene, london, geoffrey chaucer, robert dudley, sir philip sidney, the shepheardes calender, colonial ireland, kilcolman castle.

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.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe
78% love, beloved, beauty
Compare
The sovereign beauty which I do admire
Edmund Spenser
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe
78% life, beloved, beauty
Compare
The glorious portrait of that Angel's face
Edmund Spenser
I walk'd along a stream
Christopher Marlowe
76% divine
Compare
The sovereign beauty which I do admire
Edmund Spenser
I walk'd along a stream
Christopher Marlowe
76% divine
Compare
The glorious portrait of that Angel's face
Edmund Spenser
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe
75% beloved, beauty
Compare
Men call you fayre
Edmund Spenser
I walk'd along a stream
Christopher Marlowe
75% divine
Compare
Men call you fayre
Edmund Spenser

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Christopher Marlowe: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder. Edmund Spenser: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.

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