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

Allan Ramsay Allan Ramsay

Poet B

Robert Henryson Robert Henryson
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 79% Blended 79%
Swap sides Another related pair
Allan Ramsay

Allan Ramsay

c. 15 October 1684 – 7 January 1758 (~74)
2 live poems · English

Allan Ramsay was born around 15 October 1684 (some sources cite 1685 or 1686) in the rugged mining village of Leadhills, Lanarkshire, Scotland. He entered the world in a place defined by the harsh rhythms of lead extraction, where the hills echoed with the labor of men toiling for the Hopetoun estates. His father, Robert Ramsay, served as manager of Lord Hopetoun’s lead mines, a position of modest responsibility that…

“Tis none of the least of my Diversions to see one Part of the World laughing at the other, yet all seem fully satisfied with their own Opinions and Abilities; but I shall never quarrel with any Man whose Temper is the reverse of mine.”

Neighbourhood: Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Tenderness, Peace
Robert Henryson

Robert Henryson

c. 1425 – c. 1500 (~75)
1 live poem · English

In the shadowed cloisters of 15th-century Scotland, where the echoes of medieval ballads mingled with the first stirrings of Renaissance thought, Robert Henryson emerged as one of the most luminous voices among the Scots makars—the “makers” who crafted poetry not as idle pastime but as a vital craft of the soul. Born around 1425 in a land still recovering from the Wars of Independence and poised on the cusp of profou…

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Medieval Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Sorrow

In time

Allan Ramsay
Robert Henryson
1425 1758
Their lives did not overlap. 184 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 112 km separate Leadhills, Lanarkshire, Scotland from Fife, Scotland. Both have ground in Alba / Scotland.

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

From the biographies

scottish

Allan Ramsay: leadhills, lanarkshire, christian ross, the gentle shepherd, the ever green, the tea-table miscellany, jacobite, scots dialect. Robert Henryson: 15th-century scotland, scots makars, james iii, james iv, university of glasgow, the morall fabillis of esope, the testament of cresseid, dunfermline.

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.

My Peggy is a young thing
Allan Ramsay
70%
Compare
The Prais of Aige
Robert Henryson
Up in the Air
Allan Ramsay
68%
Compare
The Prais of Aige
Robert Henryson

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Allan Ramsay: Joy, Tenderness, Peace. Robert Henryson: Spirituality, Peace, Sorrow.

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