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

Frederick Tennyson Frederick Tennyson

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 85% Poems 89% Blended 87%
Swap sides Another related pair
Frederick Tennyson

Frederick Tennyson

5 June 1807 – 26 February 1898 (~91)
2 live poems · English

Frederick Tennyson was born on 5 June 1807 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, the eldest child of the Reverend George Clayton Tennyson and Elizabeth Fytche Tennyson. He died on 26 February 1898, at Belle Vue House in Jersey, aged ninety. The dates of his life place him almost exactly within the long Victorian century, though his sensibility was formed earlier, amid the unsettled intellectual climate of the Regency…

Neighbourhood: Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
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…

“The poet can scarcely be judged with fairness in one age or another. He must abide the judgment of the ages.”

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

In time

Frederick Tennyson
Alfred Lord Tennyson
1807 1898
They overlapped for 84 years (1809–1892). When Alfred Lord Tennyson was born, Frederick Tennyson was about 2. Frederick Tennyson was about 85 when Alfred Lord Tennyson died.

On the map

About 0 km separate Somersby, Lincolnshire, England from Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. Both have ground in Somersby and Lincolnshire and 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

lincolnshire poems by two brothers somersby

Frederick Tennyson: somersby rectory, lincolnshire, alfred lord tennyson, trinity college cambridge, greek literature, browne medal, cambridge apostles, maria giuliotti. 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.

In Old Age
Frederick Tennyson
86% memory
Compare
Tears, Idle Tears
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Old Age
Frederick Tennyson
86% life, memory
Compare
Tears, Idle Tears
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Old Age
Frederick Tennyson
81% world, garden
Compare
Come into the garden, Maud
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Old Age
Frederick Tennyson
80% world, life
Compare
Break, Break, Break
Alfred Lord Tennyson
In Old Age
Frederick Tennyson
80% world
Compare
Break, Break, Break
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Old Age
Frederick Tennyson
80% world
Compare
A Farewell
Alfred Lord Tennyson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Frederick Tennyson: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Alfred Lord Tennyson: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow.

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