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

James Thomson James Thomson
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 64% Poems 79% Blended 71%
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…

“As to writing poetry, or doing anything else that is rational in this floating Inferno, it is almost next to a moral impossibility.”

Neighbourhood: Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Longing
James Thomson

James Thomson

23 November 1834 – 3 June 1882 (~48)
2 live poems · English

In the pantheon of Victorian poetry, few figures cast as long and dark a shadow as James Thomson, who wrote under the mysterious initials "B.V." Born on November 23, 1834, in Port Glasgow, Scotland, Thomson would become one of the most compelling and tragic voices of his generation, a poet whose work plumbed the depths of human despair while achieving moments of transcendent beauty. His life, marked by profound loss,…

“If any thing I can scribble be entertaining to you, may I be damned to transcribe dull books for the press all my life if I do not write abundantly.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony

In time

Thomas Love Peacock
James Thomson
1785 1882
They overlapped for 33 years (1834–1866). When James Thomson was born, Thomas Love Peacock was about 49. James Thomson was about 32 when Thomas Love Peacock died.

On the map

About 615 km separate Portland, England from Port Glasgow, Scotland. Both have ground in England.

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

romantic

Thomas Love Peacock: weymouth, dorset, fanny faulkner, percy bysshe shelley, headlong hall, the genius of the thames, melincourt, walcheren expedition. James Thomson: port glasgow, b.v., the city of dreadful night, charles bradlaugh, george meredith, the doom of a city, royal military academy, philosophical skepticism.

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% life
Compare
The Fire That Filled My Heart of Old
James Thomson
The Old Man's Complaint
Thomas Love Peacock
70%
Compare
Virtue and Vice
James Thomson
Three Men of Gotham
Thomas Love Peacock
64%
Compare
The Fire That Filled My Heart of Old
James Thomson
Three Men of Gotham
Thomas Love Peacock
63%
Compare
Virtue and Vice
James Thomson

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. James Thomson: Sorrow, Despair, Irony.

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