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

Edna Wahlert McCourt Edna Wahlert McCourt

Poet B

Alice Corbin Alice Corbin
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 80% Poems 88% Blended 84%
Swap sides Another related pair
Edna Wahlert McCourt

Edna Wahlert McCourt

19 July 1887 – 4 January 1963 (~76)
2 live poems · English

Edna Wahlert McCourt, born Edna Wahlert on 19 July 1887 and dead on 4 January 1963, belonged to a generation of American women writers whose literary lives were often sustained through friendship, little magazines, local institutions, family networks, and persistent private labor rather than through the highly visible routes to fame available to a few celebrated contemporaries. She is remembered principally as a poet…

“It's a fact, true as the seasons, that the captain doesn't mix himself up in his talk of The Cause.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality
Alice Corbin

Alice Corbin

16 April 1881 – 18 July 1949 (~68)
7 live poems · English

Alice Corbin Henderson, born Alice Corbin on 16 April 1881 in St. Louis, Missouri, and dead on 18 July 1949 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, occupies an important if still insufficiently celebrated place in American literary history. She was a poet of lyrical concentration, an editor whose judgment helped define a revolutionary period in verse, a critic attentive to the relation between art and place, and a cultural organize…

“No future historian of the United States will be able to use quotations from her twentieth-century poets in support of an imperial policy of conquest and slaughter.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness

In time

Edna Wahlert McCourt
Alice Corbin
1881 1963
They overlapped for 63 years (1887–1949). When Edna Wahlert McCourt was born, Alice Corbin was about 6. Edna Wahlert McCourt was about 62 when Alice Corbin died.

On the map

About 1,280 km separate Denver, Colorado, USA from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Both have ground in St. Louis and Missouri.

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

st. louis poetry magazine history

Edna Wahlert McCourt: denver, colorado, st. louis, potter's wheel, sara teasdale, her america, the new poetry, poetry magazine. Alice Corbin: st. louis, santa fe, william penhallow henderson, poetry magazine, the spinning woman of the desert, red earth: poems of new mexico, imagism, chicago modernism.

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.

Query—A Musician speaks
Edna Wahlert McCourt
79% music
Compare
The Lyre
Alice Corbin
Query—A Musician speaks
Edna Wahlert McCourt
76% heart
Compare
Jehovah
Alice Corbin
Query—A Musician speaks
Edna Wahlert McCourt
76%
Compare
America
Alice Corbin
Query—A Musician speaks
Edna Wahlert McCourt
76% love
Compare
Love Me at Last
Alice Corbin
I Have Wandered to a Spring
Edna Wahlert McCourt
75% water
Compare
Love Me at Last
Alice Corbin
Query—A Musician speaks
Edna Wahlert McCourt
75% life
Compare
The Failing Moon
Alice Corbin

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Edna Wahlert McCourt: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality. Alice Corbin: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness.

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