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

Robert Frost Robert Frost

Poet B

Matthew Arnold Matthew Arnold
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 86% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
Robert Frost

Robert Frost

26 March 1874 – 29 January 1963 (~89)
10 live poems · English

Robert Lee Frost was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco, California, at a distance both geographical and imaginative from the New England landscape with which his name would become permanently associated. His father, William Prescott Frost Jr., was a Harvard-educated teacher turned journalist and political aspirant, a man of forceful opinions, Southern sympathies, and unstable prospects. His mother, Isabelle Mood…

“I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Peace
Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888 (~66)
12 live poems · English

Matthew Arnold was born on 24 December 1822 at Laleham, Middlesex, a village beside the Thames, and died suddenly on 15 April 1888 at Liverpool. He became one of the defining English voices of the Victorian age: a poet of haunting melancholy, a critic who sought standards of excellence amid cultural confusion, an educational civil servant with an unusually broad public vision, and a controversial commentator on relig…

“The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

Robert Frost
Matthew Arnold
1822 1963
They overlapped for 15 years (1874–1888). When Robert Frost was born, Matthew Arnold was about 52. Robert Frost was about 14 when Matthew Arnold died.

On the map

About 8,606 km separate San Francisco, California, USA from Laleham, Middlesex, England. 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

Robert Frost: san francisco, new england, william prescott frost, isabelle moodie frost, my butterfly: an elegy, the independent, elizabeth white, mending wall. Matthew Arnold: laleham, rugby school, thomas arnold, frances lucy wightman, the forsaken merman, sohrab and rustum, the scholar-gipsy, empedocles on etna.

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.

An Old Man’s Winter Night
Robert Frost
79% life, light
Compare
Despondency
Matthew Arnold
A Vantage Point
Robert Frost
77% life
Compare
Youth and Calm
Matthew Arnold
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
77% life
Compare
Youth and Calm
Matthew Arnold
Fire and Ice
Robert Frost
77%
Compare
Youth and Calm
Matthew Arnold
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost
76%
Compare
Despondency
Matthew Arnold
Fire and Ice
Robert Frost
76%
Compare
Youth's Agitations
Matthew Arnold

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Robert Frost: Wonder, Longing, Peace. Matthew Arnold: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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