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

Richard Monckton Milnes Richard Monckton Milnes

Poet B

John Keats John Keats
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 84% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Richard Monckton Milnes

Richard Monckton Milnes

19 June 1809 – 11 August 1885 (~76)
2 live poems · English

Richard Monckton Milnes, later Lord Houghton, was born on 19 June 1809 in London, into a family whose wealth, political standing, and Yorkshire connections gave him access to the governing and literary worlds of nineteenth-century Britain. He died on 11 August 1885 at Fryston Hall, near Pontefract in Yorkshire, the family seat that remained both a refuge and a symbol of his inherited position. During his long life he…

“I think gatherings representative of literary homage, and also of personal interest in the poets in whose works we still take delight, are not only very just in themselves, but extremely useful in the cause of literature.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Wonder
John Keats

John Keats

31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821 (~26)
23 live poems · English

John Keats was born in London on 31 October 1795, the first surviving child of Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings Keats. Though later admirers often imagined him as the archetypal fragile Romantic poet, set apart from ordinary life by genius and suffering, his origins were practical, urban, and socially modest. His father managed the Swan and Hoop livery stable at Moorgate, owned by Frances’s father, John Jennings. Ke…

“I find that I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of Knowledge.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality

In time

Richard Monckton Milnes
John Keats
1795 1885
They overlapped for 13 years (1809–1821). When Richard Monckton Milnes was born, John Keats was about 14. Richard Monckton Milnes was about 12 when John Keats died.

On the map

About 0 km separate London, 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

london

Richard Monckton Milnes: london, fryston hall, john keats, alfred tennyson, cambridge apostles, memorials of a tour in some parts of greece, poems of many years, palm leaves. John Keats: london, thomas keats, frances keats, charles cowden clarke, leigh hunt, endymion, ode to a nightingale, the eve of st. agnes.

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.

Loss and Gain
Richard Monckton Milnes
77%
Compare
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats
Loss and Gain
Richard Monckton Milnes
75% loss, beauty
Compare
The day is gone
John Keats
Loss and Gain
Richard Monckton Milnes
75%
Compare
In a drear-nighted December
John Keats
Loss and Gain
Richard Monckton Milnes
75% life
Compare
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art
John Keats
Loss and Gain
Richard Monckton Milnes
74%
Compare
Spenserian Stanza,
John Keats

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Richard Monckton Milnes: Sorrow, Spirituality, Wonder. John Keats: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.

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