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

John Greenleaf Whittier John Greenleaf Whittier

Poet B

William Cullen Bryant William Cullen Bryant
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 73% Poems 81% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier

17 December 1807 – 7 September 1892 (~85)
2 live poems · English

John Greenleaf Whittier was born on 17 December 1807 on his family’s farm in the East Parish of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and died on 7 September 1892 in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. During his long life, the United States changed from a young republic into an industrial and continental power scarred by civil war, and Whittier became one of the most widely read literary witnesses to that transformation. He was a poe…

“What is good looking, as Horace Smith remarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle,—generous in your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Hymn Writers, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness
William Cullen Bryant

William Cullen Bryant

3 November 1794 – 12 June 1878 (~84)
12 live poems · English

William Cullen Bryant was born on 3 November 1794 in the rural hill town of Cummington, Massachusetts, and died in New York City on 12 June 1878. During his unusually long life, he became several things at once: one of the earliest American poets to command serious respect at home and abroad, a formidable editor whose newspaper helped shape national political opinion, a translator of Homer, a civic reformer, and a pu…

“The genius of those who write in this manner may be freely acknowledged, but they do not write for mankind at large.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Wonder

In time

John Greenleaf Whittier
William Cullen Bryant
1794 1892
They overlapped for 72 years (1807–1878). When John Greenleaf Whittier was born, William Cullen Bryant was about 13. John Greenleaf Whittier was about 71 when William Cullen Bryant died.

On the map

About 153 km separate Haverhill, Massachusetts, United States from Cummington, Massachusetts, USA. Both have ground in Massachusetts.

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

helped

John Greenleaf Whittier: haverhill, new hampshire, william lloyd garrison, american anti-slavery society, quaker, legends of new england, poems written during the progress of the abolition question, ichabod. William Cullen Bryant: cummington, thanatopsis, frances fairchild, new york city, the ages, romanticism, peter bryant, the fountain and other poems.

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.

Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
72%
Compare
Oh Fairest of the Rural Maids
William Cullen Bryant
In School-Days
John Greenleaf Whittier
72%
Compare
I Broke the Spell
William Cullen Bryant
Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
72%
Compare
Soon as the glazed and gleaming snow
William Cullen Bryant
Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
71% life
Compare
The Old Man's Funeral
William Cullen Bryant
Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
71% self
Compare
I Broke the Spell
William Cullen Bryant
In School-Days
John Greenleaf Whittier
71% life
Compare
The Old Man's Funeral
William Cullen Bryant

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

John Greenleaf Whittier: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness. William Cullen Bryant: Spirituality, Peace, Wonder.

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