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

Charles Harding Firth Charles Harding Firth

Poet B

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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 55% Blended 55%
Swap sides Another related pair
Charles Harding Firth

Charles Harding Firth

16 March 1857 – 19 February 1936 (~79)
1 live poem · English

Charles Harding Firth was born in Sheffield on 16 March 1857, into a family whose prosperity, civic conscience, and intellectual ambitions helped to shape his future. His father, Mark Firth, was a prominent steel manufacturer, philanthropist, and public figure whose wealth was tied to the industrial transformation of nineteenth-century Sheffield. Yet the younger Firth’s enduring interests lay not in the furnaces and…

“He feels that he moves in a little circle of light, seeing as far as his little candle throws its beams; and beyond that comes darkness.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861 (~55)
2 live poems · English

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall in County Durham, England, the eldest of twelve children to Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke. Her arrival marked the first in her family born in England in over two centuries, as the Barrett fortune stemmed from vast sugar plantations in Jamaica. The family soon moved to Hope End, a sprawling estate near Ledbury in Herefordshire…

“The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Political Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness

In time

Charles Harding Firth
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806 1936
They overlapped for 5 years (1857–1861). When Charles Harding Firth was born, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was about 51. Charles Harding Firth was about 4 when Elizabeth Barrett Browning died.

On the map

About 144 km separate Sheffield, England from Durham, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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.

Charles Harding Firth only

Elizabeth Barrett Browning only

From the biographies

Charles Harding Firth: sheffield, mark firth, english civil war, oliver cromwell, the rule of the puritans, samuel rawson gardiner, clifton college, new college oxford. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: county durham, hope end, the battle of marathon, the seraphim and other poems, the cry of the children, robert browning, sonnets from the portuguese, aurora leigh.

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 British Tars
Charles Harding Firth
64%
Compare
The Prospect
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The British Tars
Charles Harding Firth
64%
Compare
How Do I Love Thee?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Charles Harding Firth: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness.

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