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

Algernon Charles Swinburne Algernon Charles Swinburne

Poet B

Witter Bynner Witter Bynner
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 70% Poems 86% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne

5 April 1837 – 10 April 1909 (~72)
14 live poems · English

Algernon Charles Swinburne was born on 5 April 1837 at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, into a family whose rank, traditions, and geography would all enter his imagination. He was the eldest surviving child of Captain, later Admiral, Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta Ashburnham, daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham. His inheritance was aristocratic, military, and literary. The Swinburnes p…

“A child with any ear or eye for the attraction of verse or art can dispense with analysis and rest content to apprehend it without comprehension; it were to be wished that adults equally incapable would rest equally content.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Dramatic Poets, Political Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Witter Bynner

Witter Bynner

10 August 1881 – 1 June 1968 (~87)
4 live poems · English

Harold Witter Bynner, who published almost always as Witter Bynner and was known to friends as “Hal,” was born on 10 August 1881 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on 1 June 1968 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His long career carried him through several distinct literary eras: the cultivated, metrically formal verse of the early twentieth century; the disruptions and provocations of modernism; the American enthusiasm for Asia…

“Wordsworth, of our poets, comes closest to the Chinese; but their poetry cleaves even nearer to nature than his.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Imagist Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality

In time

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Witter Bynner
1837 1968
They overlapped for 29 years (1881–1909). When Witter Bynner was born, Algernon Charles Swinburne was about 44. Witter Bynner was about 28 when Algernon Charles Swinburne died.

On the map

About 5,568 km separate Grosvenor Place, London, England from Brooklyn, New York, 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

gave

Algernon Charles Swinburne: london, isle of wight, northumberland, captain charles henry swinburne, lady jane henrietta ashburnham, atalanta in calydon, poems and ballads, percy bysshe shelley. Witter Bynner: brooklyn, santa fe, harvard university, young harvard, grenstone poems, spectrism, emanuel morgan, kiang kang-hu.

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.

A Leave-Taking
Algernon Charles Swinburne
76%
Compare
Sands
Witter Bynner
Before Sunset
Algernon Charles Swinburne
75% love
Compare
Romance
Witter Bynner
By Twilight
Algernon Charles Swinburne
75%
Compare
Sands
Witter Bynner
The Sundew
Algernon Charles Swinburne
74% love
Compare
Romance
Witter Bynner
In Time of Mourning
Algernon Charles Swinburne
74% love
Compare
Romance
Witter Bynner
Love laid his sleepless head
Algernon Charles Swinburne
73% love
Compare
Romance
Witter Bynner

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Algernon Charles Swinburne: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Witter Bynner: Wonder, Longing, Spirituality.

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