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.

After the death of my mother, 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.

My wife and I are simplifying our days. The server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the quieter life we want.

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.

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

Edwin Arlington Robinson Edwin Arlington Robinson

Poet B

Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Lord Tennyson
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 71% Poems 87% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson

22 December 1869 – 6 April 1935 (~66)
10 live poems · English

Edwin Arlington Robinson stands as one of the most distinctive and influential voices in American poetry. Renowned for his psychologically nuanced portraits, precise craftsmanship, and unflinching explorations of the human condition, Robinson’s work bridges the 19th and 20th centuries, offering both the rigor of tradition and the insights of modernity. His journey from the small towns of Maine to the literary heights…

“To be ambitious of becoming a great man is the first step towards becoming a little man.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Alfred Lord Tennyson

6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892 (~83)
27 live poems · English

Alfred Tennyson, later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, England, and died on 6 October 1892 at Lurgashall in Sussex. During his long life he became the defining poetic voice of the Victorian age: at once a public laureate who wrote for national occasions and a private, searching poet whose work returned obsessively to bereavement, desire, religious uncertainty, mem…

“For myself, the world is the shadow of God.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Edwin Arlington Robinson
Alfred Lord Tennyson
1809 1935
They overlapped for 24 years (1869–1892). When Edwin Arlington Robinson was born, Alfred Lord Tennyson was about 60. Edwin Arlington Robinson was about 23 when Alfred Lord Tennyson died.
Edwin Arlington Robinson in history Alfred Lord Tennyson in history Years they were given

On the map

About 5,003 km separate Head Tide, Maine, USA from Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Alfred Lord Tennyson

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

life death dead

Edwin Arlington Robinson only

social self happiness limits enduring clerks humanity philosophical ordinary shop recognition roman

Alfred Lord Tennyson only

world nature desire love beauty light fantasy absence sound power voice grief

From the biographies

Edwin Arlington Robinson: head tide maine, gardiner maine, tilbury town, the torrent and the night before, the children of the night, richard cory, miniver cheevy, the man against the sky. Alfred Lord Tennyson: somersby, lincolnshire, victorian age, arthur henry hallam, in memoriam, the lady of shalott, the lotos-eaters, ulysses.

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 Pilot
Edwin Arlington Robinson
78% pilot, life
Compare
Crossing the Bar
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Pilot
Edwin Arlington Robinson
77%
Compare
The mountain wooded to the peak
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Pilot
Edwin Arlington Robinson
77% loss
Compare
A Farewell
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Another Dark Lady
Edwin Arlington Robinson
76% beloved
Compare
The Miller’s Daughter
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Exit
Edwin Arlington Robinson
76% dead, death
Compare
Break, Break, Break
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Tavern
Edwin Arlington Robinson
76%
Compare
The Deserted House
Alfred Lord Tennyson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1869 Completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad
1870 Hardy Meets Emma Lavinia Gifford in Cornwall
1870 Second Industrial Revolution Accelerates
1871 Publication of 'Middlemarch'
1871 Publication of 'Rimas'
1873 Maxwell publishes Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in Cambridge
1873 Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' Composition
1876 Gerard Manley Hopkins composes his major poems

Edwin Arlington Robinson

1891 Robinson's Enrollment at Harvard University
1896 Publication of First Book, 'The Torrent and the Nightingale'
1897 Publication of 'Children of the Night'
1897 Publication of 'The Children of the Night'
1904 Publication of 'The Man Who Died'
1921 Robinson's First Pulitzer Prize
1922 Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1928 Robinson's Second Pulitzer Prize

Alfred Lord Tennyson

1827 Tennyson Enters Trinity College
1829 Tennyson Wins Chancellor's Gold Medal
1833 Death of Arthur Hallam
1850 Marriage to Emily Sellwood
1850 Publication of 'In Memoriam A.H.H.'
1859 Publication of 'Idylls of the King'
1892 Tennyson's Final Poems Published
1892 Tennyson's Later Life and Death

Emotional landscapes

Edwin Arlington Robinson: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Alfred Lord Tennyson: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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