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

Charles Tennyson Turner Charles Tennyson Turner

Poet B

Edgar Lee Masters Edgar Lee Masters
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 63% Poems 85% Blended 73%
Swap sides Another related pair
Charles Tennyson Turner

Charles Tennyson Turner

4 July 1808 – 25 April 1879 (~71)
8 live poems · English

Charles Tennyson Turner was born Charles Turner on 4 July 1808 at Somersby Rectory in Lincolnshire, and died on 25 April 1879 at Grasby, also in Lincolnshire. He lived during the long Victorian transformation of English literary culture, yet his own life retained a strongly local character: he was a country clergyman, a husband, a brother in an unusually gifted family, and a poet whose finest achievements were small…

“I feel confident that you have a good and sufficient supply of fancy and imagination.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness
Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters

23 August 1868 – 5 March 1950 (~82)
25 live poems · English

In the pantheon of American literature, few poets have captured the essence of small-town life with such unflinching honesty and profound empathy as Edgar Lee Masters. Born in the twilight of the nineteenth century and dying in the shadow of World War II, Masters lived through one of the most transformative periods in American history. His masterwork, Spoon River Anthology, revolutionized American poetry by giving vo…

“My heart is with the prairies.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing

In time

Charles Tennyson Turner
Edgar Lee Masters
1808 1950
They overlapped for 12 years (1868–1879). When Edgar Lee Masters was born, Charles Tennyson Turner was about 60. Edgar Lee Masters was about 11 when Charles Tennyson Turner died.

On the map

About 7,010 km separate Somersby, Lincolnshire, England from Garnett, Kansas, USA. 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

Charles Tennyson Turner: somersby rectory, lincolnshire, alfred tennyson, frederick tennyson, poems by two brothers, trinity college cambridge, vicar of grasby, louisa sellwood. Edgar Lee Masters: garnett, kansas, lewiston, illinois, spoon river anthology, william marion reedy, chicago renaissance, the blood of the prophets, a book of verses, helen m. jenkins.

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 Parting-Gate
Charles Tennyson Turner
81% death, life, grief
Compare
I Shall Never See You Again
Edgar Lee Masters
The Parting-Gate
Charles Tennyson Turner
78%
Compare
By the Waters of Babylon
Edgar Lee Masters
On Finding a Small Fly Crushed in a Book
Charles Tennyson Turner
75% life, death
Compare
I Shall Never See You Again
Edgar Lee Masters
The Parting-Gate
Charles Tennyson Turner
74% life
Compare
Fletcher McGee
Edgar Lee Masters
The Parting-Gate
Charles Tennyson Turner
73% life
Compare
Isaiah Beethoven
Edgar Lee Masters
Sunrise
Charles Tennyson Turner
73% world
Compare
Isaiah Beethoven
Edgar Lee Masters

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Charles Tennyson Turner: Spirituality, Longing, Tenderness. Edgar Lee Masters: Sorrow, Spirituality, Longing.

Skip to main content