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

Herbert Gorman Herbert Gorman
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 68% Poems 87% Blended 76%
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…

“The mature poet, in the operations of his mind, works like the chemist. He is aware, not that he wants to say something, but that there is something to be said.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Listen Timeline Affinities
Herbert Gorman

Herbert Gorman

January 1893 – 28 October 1954 (~61)
2 live poems · English

Herbert Sherman Gorman entered the world in 1893 in Springfield, Massachusetts, a bustling industrial city nestled along the Connecticut River, where the hum of factories and the clang of railroads shaped the rhythms of daily life. Though the precise day of his birth remains unrecorded in many accounts, his arrival coincided with an America on the cusp of modernity, one foot still planted in the Victorian era and the…

“Great literature demands an active reader, one willing to meet the writer halfway in the work of imagination.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Decadent Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

T. S. Eliot
Herbert Gorman
1888 1965
They overlapped for 62 years (1893–1954). When Herbert Gorman was born, T. S. Eliot was about 5. T. S. Eliot was about 66 when Herbert Gorman died.
T. S. Eliot in history Herbert Gorman in history Years they were given

On the map

About 1,537 km separate St. Louis, Missouri, USA from Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. Shared ground: United States.

T. S. Eliot

Herbert Gorman

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.

Shared

self

T. S. Eliot only

world spiritual death memory urban fragmented despair modernity social life consciousness history

Herbert Gorman only

mandrake attachment grief pain sufferer love lilith moon desire longing passionate beauty

From the biographies

T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne. Herbert Gorman: springfield massachusetts, new york city, jean wright gorman, the barcarole of james smith, the procession of masks, the peterborough anthology, james joyce, a passage to india.

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.

Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
80%
Compare
Lilith, Lilith
Herbert Gorman
La Figlia Che Piange
T. S. Eliot
78%
Compare
Lilith, Lilith
Herbert Gorman
Whispers of Immortality
T. S. Eliot
77%
Compare
Lilith, Lilith
Herbert Gorman
Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears
T. S. Eliot
76%
Compare
Lilith, Lilith
Herbert Gorman
The Wind Sprang up at Four O'clock
T. S. Eliot
76%
Compare
Lilith, Lilith
Herbert Gorman
The Wind Sprang up at Four O'clock
T. S. Eliot
76%
Compare
The Mandrake Root
Herbert Gorman

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

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'
1895 The X-Ray Discovery
1896 Publication of 'A Shropshire Lad'

T. S. Eliot

1906 Eliot's Education at Harvard
1915 Publication of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'
1917 Publication of 'Prufrock and Other Observations'
1922 Publication of 'The Waste Land'
1925 Publication of 'The Hollow Men'
1927 Conversion to Anglicanism
1933 Separation from Vivienne Haigh-Wood
1943 Publication of 'Four Quartets'

Herbert Gorman

1909 Early Literary Aspirations of Herbert Gorman
1910 Career Beginnings in Journalism
1918 Relocation to New York City
1920 Book Reviewer for The New York Times
1923 Marriage to Margaret Gorman
1930 Publication of 'The Man Who Was a Horse'
1935 Friendship with William Carlos Williams
1941 Publication of 'The Life of the Poet'

Emotional landscapes

T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Herbert Gorman: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.

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