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

Grace Fallow Norton Grace Fallow Norton

Poet B

Nora Hopper Chesson Nora Hopper Chesson
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 77% Poems 92% Blended 83%
Swap sides Another related pair
Grace Fallow Norton

Grace Fallow Norton

29 October 1876 – 1926 (~50)
4 live poems · English

Grace Fallow Norton, born on 29 October 1876 in Northfield, Minnesota, and deceased in 1926, belongs to that large and consequential company of American poets whose work was respected in its own moment yet gradually slipped from broad public view. Her surviving reputation rests chiefly on a small body of lyric poetry, especially the 1912 collection Little Gray Songs from St. Joseph’s, a book whose title alone suggest…

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Nora Hopper Chesson

Nora Hopper Chesson

2 January 1871 – 14 April 1906 (~35)
79 live poems · English

Nora Hopper Chesson, born Nora Hopper on 2 January 1871 in Exeter, England, and dead on 14 April 1906, belongs to that compelling company of poets whose work has remained more vivid than their public reputation. Her life was brief, her published oeuvre relatively small, and the surviving record of her private circumstances incomplete. Yet the poems she left behind possess a distinctive pressure and atmosphere: they a…

“They followed a wandering star to a mean stable in a little Jewish town.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

Grace Fallow Norton
Nora Hopper Chesson
1871 1926
They overlapped for 31 years (1876–1906). When Grace Fallow Norton was born, Nora Hopper Chesson was about 5. Grace Fallow Norton was about 30 when Nora Hopper Chesson died.

On the map

About 6,335 km separate Northfield, Minnesota, USA from Exeter, Devon, England. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

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

Grace Fallow Norton: northfield, minnesota, little gray songs from st. joseph's, smith college, christina rossetti, elizabeth barrett browning, emily dickinson, brontë sisters. Nora Hopper Chesson: exeter, irish literary revival, under quicken boughs, celtic legend, wilfrid hugh chesson, fin de siècle, decadence, folk revival.

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.

Love is a Terrible Thing
Grace Fallow Norton
87% love, wind
Compare
Gypsy Song
Nora Hopper Chesson
Love is a Terrible Thing
Grace Fallow Norton
83%
Compare
A Connaught Lament
Nora Hopper Chesson
Love is a Terrible Thing
Grace Fallow Norton
81%
Compare
Fire and Snow
Nora Hopper Chesson
Love is a Terrible Thing
Grace Fallow Norton
80% love
Compare
A Marriage Charm
Nora Hopper Chesson
Oh, the Burden, the Burden of Love Ungiven
Grace Fallow Norton
80% love, silence
Compare
May Eve
Nora Hopper Chesson
Love is a Terrible Thing
Grace Fallow Norton
80% love, wind
Compare
May Eve
Nora Hopper Chesson

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Grace Fallow Norton: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Nora Hopper Chesson: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

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