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.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this 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

T. S. Eliot T. S. Eliot

Poet B

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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 69% Poems 82% Blended 75%
Swap sides Another related pair
T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965 (~77)
14 live poems · English

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…

“As for us, we know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832 (~83)
2 live poems · German

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main and dead 22 March 1832 in Weimar, became during his own lifetime a European institution: poet, dramatist, novelist, critic, civil servant, theater director, scientific investigator, memoirist, and theorist of culture. To call him Germany’s greatest writer is conventional but not empty praise. Goethe helped give the German language a literary authori…

“The higher demands are in themselves more worthy, even when unfulfilled, than lower ones completely fulfilled.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, German Romantics, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow

In time

T. S. Eliot
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749 1965
Their lives did not overlap. 56 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 7,374 km separate St. Louis, Missouri, USA from Frankfurt, Germany. 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.

Shared

From the biographies

social

T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: frankfurt am main, weimar, sturm und drang, the sorrows of young werther, götz von berlichingen, anna katharina schönkopf, friederike brion, charlotte von stein.

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.

Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears
T. S. Eliot
75%
Compare
Sehnsucht
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
75%
Compare
Wanderer's Nightsong
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Wind Sprang up at Four O'clock
T. S. Eliot
73% death, world
Compare
Wanderer's Nightsong
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
73%
Compare
Sehnsucht
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
La Figlia Che Piange
T. S. Eliot
72%
Compare
Sehnsucht
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
72% world
Compare
Wanderer's Nightsong
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow.

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