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

Archibald MacLeish Archibald MacLeish

Poet B

Vachel Lindsay Vachel Lindsay
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 84% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Archibald MacLeish

Archibald MacLeish

7 May 1892 – 20 April 1982 (~90)
2 live poems · English

In the pantheon of twentieth-century American letters, few figures embodied as many contradictions and reconciliations as Archibald MacLeish. Born on May 7, 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois, and dying on April 20, 1982, in Boston, Massachusetts, MacLeish lived through nearly the entire span of the American century, bearing witness to two world wars, the Great Depression, the atomic age, and the cultural revolutions that re…

“The poet's task is not to make the world strange, but to make the strange world visible.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Modernist Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities
Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay

10 November 1879 – 5 December 1931 (~52)
3 live poems · English

Vachel Lindsay, born Nicholas Vachel Lindsay on November 10, 1879, in Springfield, Illinois, and dead by his own hand on December 5, 1931, in the same Midwestern city, lived a life as dramatic and rhythmically charged as the poems he declaimed on lecture platforms and village greens across America. Often called the “Prairie Troubadour” or the “singing poet,” he sought nothing less than a rebirth of poetry as an oral,…

“The art of poetry is the art of making the commonplace uncommon.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Poet-Musicians
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Archibald MacLeish
Vachel Lindsay
1879 1982
They overlapped for 40 years (1892–1931). When Archibald MacLeish was born, Vachel Lindsay was about 13. Archibald MacLeish was about 39 when Vachel Lindsay died.
Archibald MacLeish in history Vachel Lindsay in history Years they were given

On the map

About 304 km separate Glencoe, Illinois, USA from Springfield, Illinois, USA. Both have ground in Illinois.

Archibald MacLeish

Vachel Lindsay

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.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

Archibald MacLeish only

world dead history witness legend youth grief dance romance life stars wheat

Vachel Lindsay only

divine heaven salvation grace social earthly redemption desert spiritual religious horror encounter

From the biographies

Archibald MacLeish: glencoe, illinois, harvard law school, ada hitchcock, the hamlet of a. macleish, conquistador, pulitzer prize, the happy marriage and other poems, the pot of earth. Vachel Lindsay: springfield illinois, prairie troubadour, higher vaudeville, general william booth enters into heaven, the congo, harriet monroe, rhythmic poetry, walking journeys.

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.

The Too-Late Born
Archibald MacLeish
77% world
Compare
The Flower-Fed Buffaloes
Vachel Lindsay
Youth is old before his time
Archibald MacLeish
75% world
Compare
The Flower-Fed Buffaloes
Vachel Lindsay
The Too-Late Born
Archibald MacLeish
73%
Compare
I Went Down Into the Desert
Vachel Lindsay
Youth is old before his time
Archibald MacLeish
72%
Compare
I Went Down Into the Desert
Vachel Lindsay
The Too-Late Born
Archibald MacLeish
70%
Compare
General William Booth Enters into Heaven
Vachel Lindsay
Youth is old before his time
Archibald MacLeish
66%
Compare
General William Booth Enters into Heaven
Vachel Lindsay

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1892 Opening of Ellis Island
1892 Valéry undergoes the Genoa crisis
1893 Co-founding of the Gaelic League
1893 Delivery of 'The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland' Speech
1893 Publication of 'The Hound of Heaven'
1894 Death of Robert Louis Stevenson
1894 Valéry begins his lifelong notebooks
1895 Publication of 'The Red Badge of Courage'

Archibald MacLeish

1911 Enrollment at Yale University
1917 First Major Publication: 'The Pot of Earth'
1918 Service in World War I
1932 Publication of 'Conquistador'
1939 Appointment as Librarian of Congress
1941 Publication of 'The Land of the Free'
1952 Nobel Prize in Literature
1967 Publication of 'The New Earth'

Vachel Lindsay

1914 Publication of 'The Congo'
1915 First Major Publication: 'The Art of the Moving Picture'
1917 Publication of 'The Chinese Nightingale'
1920 Marriage to Elizabeth Connor
1920 Publication of 'The Golden Book of Springfield'

Emotional landscapes

Archibald MacLeish: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Vachel Lindsay: Spirituality, Sorrow, Wonder.

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