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

Sydney Dobell Sydney Dobell

Poet B

Robert Browning Robert Browning
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 76% Poems 84% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Sydney Dobell

Sydney Dobell

5 April 1824 – 22 August 1874 (~50)
2 live poems · English

Sydney Thompson Dobell was born on 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, into a family whose circumstances placed him close to the commercial and dissenting middle-class culture of provincial England rather than to the aristocratic literary world. His father, Thomas Dobell, was a wine merchant, and the business of buying, selling, accounting, travelling, and maintaining credit would remain an important fact of Sydney’s…

“There is no essential difference in the forms of Poetic expression, but they may be conveniently divided, for our present purpose, into simple and compound.”

Neighbourhood: Romantic Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Robert Browning

Robert Browning

7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889 (~77)
19 live poems · English

Robert Browning was born on 7 May 1812 at Southampton Cottage, Camberwell, then a semi-rural district south of London, and died on 12 December 1889 in Venice. Few English poets have combined such audacity of intellect, dramatic energy, moral curiosity, and technical resourcefulness. During his lifetime he moved from the position of a puzzling, frequently mocked young writer to that of a revered elder of Victorian let…

“You speak out, you,—I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Wonder

In time

Sydney Dobell
Robert Browning
1812 1889
They overlapped for 51 years (1824–1874). When Sydney Dobell was born, Robert Browning was about 12. Robert Browning was about 62 when Sydney Dobell died.

On the map

About 58 km separate Cranbrook, Kent, England from Camberwell, London, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

Sydney Dobell: cranbrook, the roman, sydney yendys, balder, alexander smith, spasmodic poets, crimean war, the youth of europe. Robert Browning: southampton cottage, venice, dramatic monologue, elizabeth barrett browning, pauline: a fragment of a confession, my last duchess, porphyria's lover, pippa passes.

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 Sailor's Return
Sydney Dobell
74% love
Compare
The Lost Mistress
Robert Browning
The Sailor's Return
Sydney Dobell
74% love
Compare
Love in a Life
Robert Browning
The Future
Sydney Dobell
73% death
Compare
Prospice
Robert Browning
The Future
Sydney Dobell
73% death
Compare
Epilogue
Robert Browning
The Sailor's Return
Sydney Dobell
72% love
Compare
Misconceptions
Robert Browning
The Future
Sydney Dobell
72% divine
Compare
Apparitions
Robert Browning

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Sydney Dobell: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Robert Browning: Tenderness, Longing, Wonder.

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