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

James Joyce James Joyce

Poet B

John Boyle O'Reilly John Boyle O'Reilly
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 65% Poems 90% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
James Joyce

James Joyce

2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941 (~59)
24 live poems · English

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, then a prosperous southern suburb of Dublin, and died on 13 January 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is most often called a novelist, and rightly so: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake altered the possibilities of prose fiction. Yet Joyce was also a poet, a singer, a critic, a dramati…

“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Poet-Musicians
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
John Boyle O'Reilly

John Boyle O'Reilly

28 June 1844 – 10 August 1890 (~46)
12 live poems · English

On a June morning in 1844, at Dowth Castle near the banks of the River Boyne in County Meath, Ireland, a boy was born into a world of contradictions—a world of ancient Celtic splendour and modern British subjugation, of rich oral tradition and stony colonial reality. That boy, John Boyle O'Reilly, would grow to embody those contradictions more fully than perhaps any Irish-American figure of the nineteenth century: so…

“The right of revolution is sacred. It is the right of self-defence against tyranny.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Irish Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow

In time

James Joyce
John Boyle O'Reilly
1844 1941
They overlapped for 9 years (1882–1890). When James Joyce was born, John Boyle O'Reilly was about 38. James Joyce was about 8 when John Boyle O'Reilly died.

On the map

About 41 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Dowth, County Meath, Ireland. Shared ground: Ireland.

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

irish

James Joyce: nora barnacle, ulysses, dubliners, finnegans wake, a portrait of the artist as a young man, jesuit education, bloomsday, trieste. John Boyle O'Reilly: county meath, dowth castle, irish republican brotherhood, fenian movement, tenth hussars, boston pilot, father patrick mccabe, captain david r..

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.

Rain has fallen all the day
James Joyce
81% memory
Compare
An Old Picture
John Boyle O'Reilly
O, it was out by Donnycarney
James Joyce
80% memory, world
Compare
An Old Picture
John Boyle O'Reilly
Lightly come or lightly go
James Joyce
79%
Compare
My Troubles
John Boyle O'Reilly
Lightly come or lightly go
James Joyce
79%
Compare
Yesterday and To-Morrow
John Boyle O'Reilly
Rain has fallen all the day
James Joyce
79%
Compare
Yesterday and To-Morrow
John Boyle O'Reilly
Rain has fallen all the day
James Joyce
78%
Compare
The Cry of the Dreamer
John Boyle O'Reilly

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

James Joyce: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. John Boyle O'Reilly: Tenderness, Longing, Sorrow.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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