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

Anne Bradstreet Anne Bradstreet

Poet B

Jasper Mayne Jasper Mayne
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 61% Blended 61%
Swap sides Another related pair
Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet

1612 – 16 September 1672 (~60)
5 live poems · English

Anne Bradstreet was born Anne Dudley in 1612 in Northampton, England, into a family unusually well positioned to cultivate both religious seriousness and intellectual ambition. Her precise birth date is uncertain, though she was baptized on March 20, 1612. She entered the world during the reign of James I, in an England defined by political conflict, religious controversy, expanding trade, and the vigorous literary a…

“Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Colonial American Poets, Devotional Poets, Restoration Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow
Jasper Mayne

Jasper Mayne

23 November 1604 – 6 December 1672 (~68)
1 live poem · English

Jasper Mayne, born on 23 November 1604 and dead on 6 December 1672, lived at the intersection of several worlds that seventeenth-century England often tried to keep apart: the theatre and the pulpit, academic wit and ecclesiastical authority, royalist loyalty and the practical necessities of survival under a hostile regime. He was never a poet of the first rank, nor a dramatist whose name became inseparable from an a…

Neighbourhood: Cavalier Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow

In time

Anne Bradstreet
Jasper Mayne
1604 1672
They overlapped for 61 years (1612–1672). When Anne Bradstreet was born, Jasper Mayne was about 8.

On the map

About 448 km separate Northumbria, England from Hatherleigh, Devon, England. Both have ground in England.

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

religious

Anne Bradstreet: northampton, puritan, the tenth muse, simon bradstreet, the prologue, john winthrop, emmanuel college, the four monarchies. Jasper Mayne: hatherleigh, westminster school, christ church oxford, brian duppa, the city match, the amorous war, cavalier poetry, caroline culture.

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.

Before the Birth of one of her Children
Anne Bradstreet
71% love
Compare
Time
Jasper Mayne
In my Solitary houres in my dear husband his Absence
Anne Bradstreet
69% love
Compare
Time
Jasper Mayne
Upon my Son Samuel his goeing for England
Anne Bradstreet
68% love
Compare
Time
Jasper Mayne
What God is like to him I serve
Anne Bradstreet
67%
Compare
Time
Jasper Mayne

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Anne Bradstreet: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow. Jasper Mayne: Longing, Tenderness, Sorrow.

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