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

William Makepeace Thackeray William Makepeace Thackeray

Poet B

Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift
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 78% Blended 71%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray

18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863 (~52)
2 live poems · English

William Makepeace Thackeray was born on 18 July 1811 in Calcutta, British India, into a family whose comfort and status were closely connected to the expanding machinery of the East India Company. His father, Richmond Thackeray, was a civil servant and collector of revenue; his mother, Anne Becher Thackeray, came from a socially ambitious Anglo-Indian family. Although Thackeray would become one of the great interpret…

“There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.”

Neighbourhood: Light Verse Poets, Satirical Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Despair, Sorrow
Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift

30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745 (~78)
2 live poems · English

The life of Jonathan Swift presents one of literature's most fascinating paradoxes: a clergyman who wrote with brutal satirical force, an Irishman who felt himself English, a conservative who championed the oppressed, and a misanthrope whose fury arose from disappointed idealism. Born into poverty and obscurity, Swift became one of the most powerful prose writers in the English language, creating works that continue…

“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.”

Neighbourhood: Augustan Poets, Irish Poets, Light Verse Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Fear, Despair

In time

William Makepeace Thackeray
Jonathan Swift
1667 1863
Their lives did not overlap. 66 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 8,309 km separate Kolkata, India from Dublin, Ireland. 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

From the biographies

William Makepeace Thackeray: calcutta, east india company, charterhouse, trinity college, isabella gethin shawe, lady ritchie, vanity fair, the book of snobs. Jonathan Swift: gulliver's travels, a modest proposal, the drapier's letters, esther johnson, william temple, the examiner, robert harley, henry st. john.

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.

To a Very Old Woman
William Makepeace Thackeray
70% woman, beauty, social, body
Compare
A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed
Jonathan Swift
Pocahontas
William Makepeace Thackeray
66%
Compare
Clever Tom Clinch Going to Be Hanged
Jonathan Swift
To a Very Old Woman
William Makepeace Thackeray
65% death, social
Compare
Clever Tom Clinch Going to Be Hanged
Jonathan Swift
Pocahontas
William Makepeace Thackeray
64%
Compare
A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed
Jonathan Swift

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

William Makepeace Thackeray: Tenderness, Despair, Sorrow. Jonathan Swift: Irony, Fear, Despair.

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