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

Charlotte Smith Charlotte Smith
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 66% Poems 81% Blended 73%
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…

“While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age.”

Neighbourhood: Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Longing
Charlotte Smith

Charlotte Smith

4 May 1749 – 28 October 1806 (~57)
7 live poems · English

Charlotte Smith was born Charlotte Turner in London on 4 May 1749 and died at Tilford, near Farnham in Surrey, on 28 October 1806. During her lifetime she was known not only as a poet but as one of the most productive and commercially important writers in Britain. She published poetry, novels, children’s books, translations, and educational works while sustaining a large family and enduring a marriage, a debt crisis,…

“The language of the heart is not confined to any particular situation or time.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

Thomas Love Peacock
Charlotte Smith
1749 1866
They overlapped for 22 years (1785–1806). When Thomas Love Peacock was born, Charlotte Smith was about 36. Thomas Love Peacock was about 21 when Charlotte Smith died.

On the map

About 155 km separate Portland, England from Stoke next Guildford, Surrey, England. Both have ground in England and Surrey.

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

social fiction novels

Thomas Love Peacock: weymouth, dorset, fanny faulkner, percy bysshe shelley, headlong hall, the genius of the thames, melincourt, walcheren expedition. Charlotte Smith: london, elegiac sonnets, the old manor house, the emigrants, nicholas turner, benjamin smith, french revolution, georgian england.

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
77% grief
Compare
To the Muse
Charlotte Smith
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
77% death, life
Compare
The Dead Beggar
Charlotte Smith
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
73%
Compare
To the Shade of Burns
Charlotte Smith
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
72%
Compare
Go! cruel tyrant of the human breast
Charlotte Smith
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
70%
Compare
The Glow-Worm
Charlotte Smith

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Love Peacock: Spirituality, Peace, Longing. Charlotte Smith: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

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