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

Wilfred Owen Wilfred Owen

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.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 74% Poems 89% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen

18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918 (~25)
20 live poems · English

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house near Oswestry in Shropshire, on the borderland between England and Wales. He was the eldest of four children of Thomas Owen and Susan Shaw Owen; his siblings were Mary, Harold, and Colin. The family’s circumstances were respectable but precarious. Thomas had once been employed as a railway stationmaster, and Susan came from a family with str…

“The sensations of going over the top are about as exhilarating as those dreams of falling over a precipice, when you see the rocks at the bottom surging up to you.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
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…

“Of course you can have hard-and-fast rules if you like, but then you will have false rules, and they will lead you wrong.”

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

In time

Wilfred Owen
A.E.Housman
1859 1936
They overlapped for 26 years (1893–1918). When Wilfred Owen was born, A.E.Housman was about 34. A.E.Housman was about 59 when Wilfred Owen died.

On the map

About 87 km separate Oswestry, Shropshire, England from Fockbury, Worcestershire, England. Both have ground in England.

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

shropshire

Wilfred Owen: oswestry, shropshire, siegfried sassoon, dulce et decorum est, anthem for doomed youth, futility, strange meeting, disabled. 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.

Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen
85% death
Compare
The Day of Battle
A.E.Housman
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen
85% death
Compare
The Day of Battle
A.E.Housman
Spring Offensive
Wilfred Owen
84% death, battle
Compare
The Day of Battle
A.E.Housman
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen
84% death
Compare
On the idle hill of summer
A.E.Housman
The Send-Off
Wilfred Owen
84% death
Compare
The Day of Battle
A.E.Housman

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Wilfred Owen: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. A.E.Housman: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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