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 Bell Scott William Bell Scott

Poet B

Lizette Woodworth Reese Lizette Woodworth Reese
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 59% Poems 82% Blended 70%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Bell Scott

William Bell Scott

12 September 1811 – 22 November 1890 (~79)
3 live poems · English

William Bell Scott was born in Edinburgh on 12 September 1811, into a family in which art was both a livelihood and an atmosphere. He was the eldest surviving son of Robert Scott, an engraver of considerable skill and a man of strong intellectual interests, and Ross Bell Scott. The household was not wealthy, but it was rich in artistic ambition, professional discipline, books, conversation, and the practical awarenes…

“A simple experience expressed without affectation resembles some of Wordsworth's more familiar pictures, and becomes valuable, like a voice from Nature herself.”

Neighbourhood: Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Scottish Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality
Lizette Woodworth Reese

Lizette Woodworth Reese

9 January 1856 – 17 December 1935 (~79)
3 live poems · English

Lizette Woodworth Reese was born on 9 January 1856 in the Greenspring Valley area of Baltimore County, Maryland, and died in Baltimore on 17 December 1935. Her long life joined two very different literary ages. She was formed by the cadences, moral seriousness, and cultivated sentiment of nineteenth-century verse, yet some of her finest poems possess the compression, pictorial clarity, and emotional reserve that late…

“Thrice blessed are they whose early years are spent in some countryside. The flowering and withering of the seasons, and every exquisite sound and sight make them affluent with a treasure which neither change nor chance can steal away.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder

In time

William Bell Scott
Lizette Woodworth Reese
1811 1935
They overlapped for 35 years (1856–1890). When Lizette Woodworth Reese was born, William Bell Scott was about 45. Lizette Woodworth Reese was about 34 when William Bell Scott died.

On the map

About 5,508 km separate Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom from Greenspring, Baltimore County, Maryland, 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

From the biographies

William Bell Scott: edinburgh, david scott, paul's letters to his kinsfolk, the onward tide, newcastle upon tyne, trevelyan family, wallington hall, trustees' academy. Lizette Woodworth Reese: baltimore, greenspring valley, david reese, mary elizabeth woodworth reese, a branch of may, tears, a handful of lavender, a quiet road.

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.

Age
William Bell Scott
75% life
Compare
Tears
Lizette Woodworth Reese
Age
William Bell Scott
73%
Compare
Fortune
Lizette Woodworth Reese
Mare Serenitatis
William Bell Scott
72% life
Compare
Tears
Lizette Woodworth Reese
Seeking Forgetfulness
William Bell Scott
71% life
Compare
Tears
Lizette Woodworth Reese
Age
William Bell Scott
71% life
Compare
Lydia
Lizette Woodworth Reese
Seeking Forgetfulness
William Bell Scott
69%
Compare
Fortune
Lizette Woodworth Reese

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

William Bell Scott: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality. Lizette Woodworth Reese: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.

Skip to main content