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.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this 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

James Joyce James Joyce

Poet B

T. S. Eliot T. S. Eliot
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 69% Poems 86% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
James Joyce

James Joyce

2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941 (~59)
24 live poems · English

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, then a prosperous southern suburb of Dublin, and died on 13 January 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is most often called a novelist, and rightly so: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake altered the possibilities of prose fiction. Yet Joyce was also a poet, a singer, a critic, a dramati…

“I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Poet-Musicians
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965 (~77)
14 live poems · English

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony

In time

James Joyce
T. S. Eliot
1882 1965
They overlapped for 54 years (1888–1941). When T. S. Eliot was born, James Joyce was about 6. T. S. Eliot was about 53 when James Joyce died.

On the map

About 6,296 km separate Dublin, Ireland from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. 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

James Joyce: nora barnacle, ulysses, dubliners, finnegans wake, a portrait of the artist as a young man, jesuit education, bloomsday, trieste. T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne.

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.

Lightly come or lightly go
James Joyce
78%
Compare
Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
Bid Adieu
James Joyce
77%
Compare
Gerontion
T. S. Eliot

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

James Joyce: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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