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

Sir William Davenant Sir William Davenant

Poet B

Thomas d'Urfey Thomas d'Urfey
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 75% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
Sir William Davenant

Sir William Davenant

c. February 1606 – 7 April 1668 (~62)
1 live poem · English

Sir William Davenant, baptized on 3 March 1606 and buried on 9 April 1668 after his death on 7 April, was one of the great survivors and reinvigorators of seventeenth-century English literary culture. Poet, playwright, court servant, royalist officer, prisoner, theatrical entrepreneur, and eventually the leading architect of Restoration stage practice, he lived through an age in which a writer’s career could be trans…

“How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness
Thomas d'Urfey

Thomas d'Urfey

c. 1653 – 26 February 1723 (~70)
2 live poems · English

Thomas d’Urfey, born about 1653 and dead on 26 February 1723, was one of the most tireless entertainers in English literary history: a playwright, lyricist, ballad-writer, compiler, performer, political satirist, and convivial public personality whose career stretched from the high Restoration of Charles II to the early Hanoverian age. He has seldom occupied the first rank in conventional histories of English literat…

“The town may da-da-damn me as a poet, but they sing my songs for all that.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Light Verse Poets, Poet-Musicians, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder

In time

Sir William Davenant
Thomas d'Urfey
1606 1723
They overlapped for 16 years (1653–1668). When Thomas d'Urfey was born, Sir William Davenant was about 47. Thomas d'Urfey was about 15 when Sir William Davenant died.

On the map

About 203 km separate Oxford, England from Devon, 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

restoration

Sir William Davenant: oxford, crown tavern, frances stuart, fulke greville, the cruel brother, the temple of love, gondibert, poet laureate. Thomas d'Urfey: exeter, charles ii, james butler, the siege of memphis, madam fickle, a fond husband, squire oldsapp, the comical history of don quixote.

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 lark now leaves his wat'ry nest
Sir William Davenant
75% love
Compare
Love and Satyr
Thomas d'Urfey
The lark now leaves his wat'ry nest
Sir William Davenant
74%
Compare
Chloe Divine
Thomas d'Urfey

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Sir William Davenant: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness. Thomas d'Urfey: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder.

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