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

Thomas Love Peacock Thomas Love Peacock

Poet B

Thomas Chatterton Thomas Chatterton
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 84% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Love Peacock

Thomas Love Peacock

18 October 1785 – 23 January 1866 (~81)
2 live poems · English

Thomas Love Peacock was born on 18 October 1785 at Weymouth, Dorset, a coastal town whose mixture of fashionable society, maritime activity, and open sea offered an early imaginative setting for a writer who would remain drawn throughout his life to rivers, voyages, landscapes, and the contrast between civilized conversation and the unruly forces of nature. He was the only child of Samuel Peacock, a London glass merc…

“England is the modern Carthage; the love of gold, the last corruption of man, pervades the whole state from the centre to the extremities.”

Neighbourhood: Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Longing
Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton

20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770 (~18)
5 live poems · English

Thomas Chatterton was born in Bristol on 20 November 1752 and died in London on 24 August 1770, not yet eighteen years old. Few English poets have left behind a life so brief, so fiercely productive, and so persistently mythologized. His name has become almost inseparable from the image of the neglected young genius: a boy of provincial poverty who invented a medieval poetic world, attempted to conquer the London lit…

“I am now about an Oratorio, which when finished will purchase you a gown.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Folk & Ballad Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder

In time

Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Chatterton
1752 1866
Their lives did not overlap. 15 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 99 km separate Portland, England from Bristol, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

romanticism social imagination

Thomas Love Peacock: weymouth, dorset, fanny faulkner, percy bysshe shelley, headlong hall, the genius of the thames, melincourt, walcheren expedition. Thomas Chatterton: bristol, st mary redcliffe, thomas rowley, william canynge, aella, the battle of hastings, the bristowe tragedie, an excelente balade of charitie.

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.

The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
82%
Compare
The Resignation
Thomas Chatterton
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
79% death, life
Compare
Suicide
Thomas Chatterton
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
71% life
Compare
Enquiry After Happiness
Thomas Chatterton
Three Men of Gotham
Thomas Love Peacock
69%
Compare
Enquiry After Happiness
Thomas Chatterton
Three Men of Gotham
Thomas Love Peacock
69%
Compare
Acrostic on Miss Sally Clarke
Thomas Chatterton
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
68%
Compare
Acrostic on Miss Sally Clarke
Thomas Chatterton

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Love Peacock: Spirituality, Peace, Longing. Thomas Chatterton: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder.

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