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 Thomas Wyatt Sir Thomas Wyatt

Poet B

Thomas Carew Thomas Carew
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 74% Poems 88% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
Sir Thomas Wyatt

Sir Thomas Wyatt

c. 1503 – 11 October 1542 (~39)
3 live poems · English

Sir Thomas Wyatt, born about 1503 and dead on 11 October 1542, stands at the beginning of the English Renaissance lyric. He was not the first English poet to write about love, loss, faith, or fortune, but he altered the sound, scale, and inwardness of English poetry. In his hands, verse became a place where private desire could collide with public danger, where a courtier could confess exhaustion without naming its c…

“Sir, he who would be thought a wise man in the day-time, must not play the fool at night.”

Neighbourhood: Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Thomas Carew

Thomas Carew

1595 – 22 March 1640 (~45)
4 live poems · English

Thomas Carew, born in 1595 and buried on 22 March 1640, occupies a distinctive place in English poetry as one of the most accomplished voices of the Caroline court. He is usually grouped with the Cavalier poets, a loose modern designation for writers associated with the court of Charles I, with royalist culture, and with an ideal of elegance, loyalty, sociability, erotic wit, and cultivated pleasure. Yet Carew is mor…

“Though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seems he had not read the Ethics, which, among other Precepts of Morality, forbid Self-commendation.”

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sensuality, Tenderness

In time

Sir Thomas Wyatt
Thomas Carew
1503 1640
Their lives did not overlap. 53 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 37 km separate Allington Castle, Kent, England from West Wickham, Kent, England. Both have ground in Kent.

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

court desire

Sir Thomas Wyatt: english renaissance lyric, henry viii, courtier, diplomat, ambassador, whoso list to hunt, anne boleyn, petrarchan sonnet. Thomas Carew: caroline court, cavalier poets, ben jonson, to his inconstant mistress, the spring, a rapture, sir dudley carleton, venice.

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.

They Flee From Me
Sir Thomas Wyatt
83%
Compare
To My Inconstant Mistris
Thomas Carew
I Find No Peace
Sir Thomas Wyatt
81% love, desire
Compare
To My Inconstant Mistris
Thomas Carew
They Flee From Me
Sir Thomas Wyatt
80%
Compare
Secrecy in Love Pledged
Thomas Carew
Your Looks so Often Cast
Sir Thomas Wyatt
80% beloved, love, world
Compare
Secrecy in Love Pledged
Thomas Carew
They Flee From Me
Sir Thomas Wyatt
79% erotic
Compare
To My Mistress Sitting by a River’s Side
Thomas Carew
I Find No Peace
Sir Thomas Wyatt
77% love, beloved
Compare
Secrecy in Love Pledged
Thomas Carew

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Sir Thomas Wyatt: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Thomas Carew: Longing, Sensuality, Tenderness.

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