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

Stéphane Mallarmé Stéphane Mallarmé

Poet B

Richard Le Gallienne Richard Le Gallienne
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.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 69% Blended 69%
Swap sides Another related pair
Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé

18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898 (~56)
1 live poem · French

In the hushed apartment at 89 rue de Rome in Paris, amid the blue cigarette smoke of Tuesday evenings, a soft-spoken schoolteacher held court over the most revolutionary minds in French literature. Stéphane Mallarmé, a man who published fewer than seventy poems in his lifetime, would become one of the most influential figures in modern poetry, transforming language itself into a cathedral of suggestion and silence. H…

“Everything in the world exists to culminate in a book.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, French Symbolists, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing
Richard Le Gallienne

Richard Le Gallienne

20 January 1866 – 15 September 1947 (~81)
1 live poem · English

Richard Le Gallienne, born Richard Thomas Gallienne in Liverpool on 20 January 1866 and dead at Menton, France, on 15 September 1947, lived long enough to become both a participant in and a chronicler of several literary ages. He began as an ambitious young poet of the late Victorian aesthetic movement, came to public notice amid the bright notoriety of the 1890s, crossed the Atlantic to remake himself for an America…

“A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Love Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing

In time

Stéphane Mallarmé
Richard Le Gallienne
1842 1947
They overlapped for 33 years (1866–1898). When Richard Le Gallienne was born, Stéphane Mallarmé was about 24. Richard Le Gallienne was about 32 when Stéphane Mallarmé died.

On the map

About 622 km separate Paris, Île-de-France, France from Liverpool, England. Both have ground in Paris and Île-de-France.

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

Stéphane Mallarmé only

Richard Le Gallienne only

From the biographies

Stéphane Mallarmé: paris, symbolists, surrealists, l'azur, hérodiade, l'après-midi d'un faune, claude debussy, mardis. Richard Le Gallienne: liverpool, menton, oscar wilde, the yellow book, aesthetic movement, my ladies’ sonnets, the book-bills of narcissus, the quest of the golden girl.

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.

Sonnet en yx
Stéphane Mallarmé
69%
Compare
Regret
Richard Le Gallienne

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Stéphane Mallarmé: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing. Richard Le Gallienne: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.

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