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

James Joyce James Joyce

Poet B

Theodore Henry Shackelford Theodore Henry Shackelford
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 52% Poems 73% Blended 62%
Swap sides Another related pair
James Joyce

James Joyce

2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941 (~59)
24 live poems · English

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, then a prosperous southern suburb of Dublin, and died on 13 January 1941 in Zürich, Switzerland. He is most often called a novelist, and rightly so: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake altered the possibilities of prose fiction. Yet Joyce was also a poet, a singer, a critic, a dramati…

“It is an epic of two races (Israelite—Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life).”

Neighbourhood: Irish Poets, Modernist Poets, Poet-Musicians
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
Theodore Henry Shackelford

Theodore Henry Shackelford

29 May 1887 – 5 February 1923 (~36)
2 live poems · English

Theodore Henry Shackelford entered the world on May 29, 1887, in the small community of Essex, in Essex County, Ontario, Canada—just a stone’s throw from the bustling border town of Windsor. The air there carried the crisp bite of Lake Erie’s winds, and the landscape, though far from the cotton fields of the American South, still echoed with the stories of Black families who had found refuge in Canada via the Undergr…

Neighbourhood: African American Poets, American Poets, Devotional Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Tenderness, Peace

In time

James Joyce
Theodore Henry Shackelford
1882 1941
They overlapped for 37 years (1887–1923). When Theodore Henry Shackelford was born, James Joyce was about 5. James Joyce was about 41 when Theodore Henry Shackelford died.

On the map

About 5,564 km separate Dublin, Ireland from Essex, Ontario, Canada. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

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.

From the biographies

James Joyce: nora barnacle, ulysses, dubliners, finnegans wake, a portrait of the artist as a young man, jesuit education, bloomsday, trieste. Theodore Henry Shackelford: essex county, ontario, mammy’s cracklin’ bread, my country, paul laurence dunbar, new negro movement, sojourner truth home, colored orphanage.

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.

Lightly come or lightly go
James Joyce
67%
Compare
Mammy's Cracklin' Bread
Theodore Henry Shackelford
Thou leanest to the shell of night
James Joyce
67%
Compare
Mammy's Cracklin' Bread
Theodore Henry Shackelford
Thou leanest to the shell of night
James Joyce
66%
Compare
Commencement
Theodore Henry Shackelford
Bid Adieu
James Joyce
66%
Compare
Commencement
Theodore Henry Shackelford
I would in that sweet bosom be
James Joyce
66%
Compare
Mammy's Cracklin' Bread
Theodore Henry Shackelford
Bid Adieu
James Joyce
65%
Compare
Mammy's Cracklin' Bread
Theodore Henry Shackelford

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

James Joyce: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Theodore Henry Shackelford: Joy, Tenderness, Peace.

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