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

Edward Hovell-Thurlow Edward Hovell-Thurlow

Poet B

Alice Cary Alice Cary
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 62% Poems 74% Blended 67%
Swap sides Another related pair
Edward Hovell-Thurlow

Edward Hovell-Thurlow

10 June 1781 – 4 June 1829 (~48)
2 live poems · English

Edward Hovell-Thurlow, second Baron Thurlow, was born on 10 June 1781 in the Temple, London, and died at Brighton on 4 June 1829, six days before his forty-eighth birthday. He lived during one of the most turbulent and brilliant eras in English literary history: the age of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the Regency, and the flowering of Romantic poetry. Yet he occupied an unusual position within that age…

Neighbourhood: Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Wonder, Tenderness
Alice Cary

Alice Cary

26 April 1820 – 12 February 1871 (~51)
2 live poems · English

Alice Cary was born on 26 April 1820 in Mount Healthy, Ohio, then a small rural community north of Cincinnati, and died in New York City on 12 February 1871. During her lifetime she became one of the most widely read American women poets of the nineteenth century, as well as a successful novelist, sketch writer, editor, lecturer, and literary hostess. Her name was once familiar in households that memorized poems, san…

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Wonder

In time

Edward Hovell-Thurlow
Alice Cary
1781 1871
They overlapped for 10 years (1820–1829). When Alice Cary was born, Edward Hovell-Thurlow was about 39. Alice Cary was about 9 when Edward Hovell-Thurlow died.

On the map

About 6,359 km separate Westminster, London, England from Mount Healthy, Ohio, 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.

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

From the biographies

Edward Hovell-Thurlow: temple, london, brighton, second baron thurlow, thomas thurlow, anne bere, edward thurlow, charterhouse school, magdalen college, oxford. Alice Cary: mount healthy, new york city, phoebe cary, the female poets of america, poems of alice and phoebe cary, clovernook, hagar: a story of to-day, nearer home.

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.

May
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
72%
Compare
Rich, Though Poor
Alice Cary
The Summer
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
68%
Compare
Rich, Though Poor
Alice Cary
May
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
67%
Compare
The West Country
Alice Cary
The Summer
Edward Hovell-Thurlow
62%
Compare
The West Country
Alice Cary

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Edward Hovell-Thurlow: Joy, Wonder, Tenderness. Alice Cary: Irony, Sorrow, Wonder.

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