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

Sadakichi Hartmann Sadakichi Hartmann

Poet B

William Ellery Leonard William Ellery Leonard
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 68% Poems 76% Blended 72%
Swap sides Another related pair
Sadakichi Hartmann

Sadakichi Hartmann

8 November 1867 – 22 November 1944 (~77)
2 live poems · English

Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on 8 November 1867 on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, a narrow strip of land that for generations had been Japan’s only window onto the West. His father, Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann, was a Prussian merchant trading in that tightly regulated enclave; his mother, Osada, was Japanese and died within months of the boy’s birth, leaving him with a wound he never stopped p…

“Studio visits are valuable because they are the only way to get at a man's individuality.”

Neighbourhood: Asian American Poets, Japanese Haiku Masters, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing
William Ellery Leonard

William Ellery Leonard

25 January 1876 – 2 May 1944 (~68)
2 live poems · English

On January 25, 1876, in the quiet town of Plainfield, New Jersey, William Ellery Channing Leonard was born into a world of literary aspiration and transcendentalist idealism. His parents, fervent admirers of the New England intellectual tradition, named their only child after William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian minister who had mentored Ralph Waldo Emerson. This choice of name proved prophetic, for Leonard would s…

“We are human from the start. We do not need to see a man die to know death. Death is born with our birth.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Confessional Poets, Death & Mortality, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness

In time

Sadakichi Hartmann
William Ellery Leonard
1867 1944
They overlapped for 69 years (1876–1944). When William Ellery Leonard was born, Sadakichi Hartmann was about 9.

On the map

About 11,485 km separate Dejima, Nagasaki, Japan from Plainfield, New Jersey, USA. Shared ground: United States.

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

Sadakichi Hartmann: dejima, nagasaki harbor, walt whitman, whitman society, christ: a dramatic poem, buddha, confucius, mohammed. William Ellery Leonard: plainfield, new jersey, charlotte freeman, two lives, sonnets and poems, the lynching bee and other poems, agoraphobia, madison mob, boston university.

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.

Tanka II
Sadakichi Hartmann
74% love
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
Tanka II
Sadakichi Hartmann
72%
Compare
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard
Tanka I
Sadakichi Hartmann
69%
Compare
It's age, not youth, alone can truly love
William Ellery Leonard
Tanka I
Sadakichi Hartmann
63%
Compare
O be my voice, belovèd, or I die
William Ellery Leonard

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Sadakichi Hartmann: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing. William Ellery Leonard: Longing, Sorrow, Tenderness.

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