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

Arthur Shearly Cripps Arthur Shearly Cripps

Poet B

Roscoe C. Jamison Roscoe C. Jamison
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 70% Blended 70%
Swap sides Another related pair
Arthur Shearly Cripps

Arthur Shearly Cripps

10 June 1869 – 1 August 1952 (~83)
1 live poem · English

Arthur Shearly Cripps was born on 10 June 1869, the son of Charles Alfred Cripps, later the first Baron Parmoor, and Theresa Potter Cripps. He belonged, by birth and education, to the privileged English world that supplied many of the administrators, clergy, soldiers, and writers of the British Empire. Yet the course of his life led him into a searching and often lonely quarrel with that world. He became an Anglican…

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Social Justice Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Sorrow
Roscoe C. Jamison

Roscoe C. Jamison

c. 1888 – 28 March 1918 (~30)
1 live poem · English

In the shadowed corridors of early twentieth-century American literature, where the voices of African American poets often echoed against the unyielding walls of racial indifference, Roscoe Conkling Jamison stands as a poignant figure—a man whose brief life burned with the quiet fire of genius, only to be extinguished far too soon. Born around 1888 in the small town of Winchester, Tennessee, and passing away on March…

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Anger

In time

Arthur Shearly Cripps
Roscoe C. Jamison
1869 1952
They overlapped for 31 years (1888–1918). When Roscoe C. Jamison was born, Arthur Shearly Cripps was about 19. Arthur Shearly Cripps was about 49 when Roscoe C. Jamison died.

On the map

About 6,646 km separate Warwickshire, England from Winchester, Tennessee, 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.

Shared

Arthur Shearly Cripps only

Roscoe C. Jamison only

From the biographies

african racial

Arthur Shearly Cripps: southern rhodesia, st faith’s mission, the black christ, africa for africans, first chimurenga, cecil rhodes, oxford movement, trinity college oxford. Roscoe C. Jamison: winchester tennessee, negro soldiers, the crisis, fisk university, william f. neil, great war, jim crow, st. joseph missouri.

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 Black Christ
Arthur Shearly Cripps
75% hope
Compare
The Negro Soldiers
Roscoe C. Jamison

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Arthur Shearly Cripps: Spirituality, Longing, Sorrow. Roscoe C. Jamison: Spirituality, Sorrow, Anger.

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