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

Laurence Binyon Laurence Binyon

Poet B

A.E.Housman A.E.Housman
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 77% Poems 90% Blended 83%
Swap sides Another related pair
Laurence Binyon

Laurence Binyon

10 August 1869 – 10 March 1943 (~74)
3 live poems · English

Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…

“The picture is not filled; it is waiting for our imagination to enter into it.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Peace
Listen Timeline Affinities
A.E.Housman

A.E.Housman

26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936 (~77)
19 live poems · English

Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 at Valley House, Fockbury, a small hamlet near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, England, and died in Cambridge on 30 April 1936. He became, by way of an unusually divided life, both one of the most recognizable lyric poets in English and one of the most formidable classical scholars of his generation. The apparent contrast between these identities has long fascinated reade…

“We study, they say, not that we may earn a livelihood, but that we may transform and beautify our inner nature by culture.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Laurence Binyon
A.E.Housman
1859 1943
They overlapped for 68 years (1869–1936). When Laurence Binyon was born, A.E.Housman was about 10. Laurence Binyon was about 67 when A.E.Housman died.
Laurence Binyon in history A.E.Housman in history Years they were given

On the map

About 195 km separate Lancaster, England from Fockbury, Worcestershire, England. Both have ground in England.

Laurence Binyon

A.E.Housman

Open both on the History Atlas

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

world dead death memory life

Laurence Binyon only

fallen grief soldiers house cedar landscape garden domestic flowers summer street

A.E.Housman only

love beauty self nature mortality heart desire pastoral soldier condemned existence

From the biographies

scholarship

Laurence Binyon: lancaster, for the fallen, cicely margaret powell, the times, british museum, trinity college, painting in the far east, the flight of the dragon. A.E.Housman: fockbury, bromsgrove, moses jackson, a shropshire lad, loveliest of trees, to an athlete dying young, when i was one-and-twenty, classical scholar.

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.

For the Fallen
Laurence Binyon
84% death, soldiers
Compare
On the idle hill of summer
A.E.Housman
For the Fallen
Laurence Binyon
83% dead, death
Compare
With rue my heart is laden
A.E.Housman
For the Fallen
Laurence Binyon
83% death
Compare
The Day of Battle
A.E.Housman
For the Fallen
Laurence Binyon
79% death
Compare
To an Athlete Dying Young
A.E.Housman
The House That Was
Laurence Binyon
78% world
Compare
In my own shire
A.E.Housman
The House That Was
Laurence Binyon
78%
Compare
With rue my heart is laden
A.E.Housman

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1869 Completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad
1870 Hardy Meets Emma Lavinia Gifford in Cornwall
1870 Second Industrial Revolution Accelerates
1871 Publication of 'Middlemarch'
1871 Publication of 'Rimas'
1873 Maxwell publishes Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in Cambridge
1873 Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' Composition
1876 Gerard Manley Hopkins composes his major poems

Laurence Binyon

1887 Scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford
1893 Employment at the British Museum
1894 Publication of 'Lyric Poems'
1911 Publication of 'The Flight of the Dragon'
1914 Volunteering for hospital service during WWI
1914 Writing of 'For the Fallen'
1916 Publication of 'The Great War and the British Empire'
1943 Publication of 'The Collected Poems of Laurence Binyon'

A.E.Housman

1877 Education at St John's College, Oxford
1877 Unrequited Love for Moses Jackson
1892 Appointment as Professor of Latin at University College London
1894 Death of his Father
1896 Publication of 'A Shropshire Lad'
1905 Appointment as Professor of Latin at University College London
1917 Death of Edward Thomas
1922 Publication of 'Last Poems'

Emotional landscapes

Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace. A.E.Housman: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

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