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

Elizabeth Devereux Elizabeth Devereux

Poet B

Helen Dudley Helen Dudley
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 80% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Elizabeth Devereux

Elizabeth Devereux

12 March 1934 – 29 July 2023 (~89)
2 live poems · English

Elizabeth Devereux was born on 12 March 1934 in Singapore, then a British colonial port whose commercial prosperity, cultural variety, and precarious imperial order formed the background of her earliest years. She died on 29 July 2023, aged eighty-nine, after a life that crossed continents, social worlds, and ideas of what a literary life ought to look like. Though she did not achieve conventional public recognition…

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace
Helen Dudley

Helen Dudley

3 June 1886 – 1932 (~46)
1 live poem · English

Helen Dudley was born on 3 June 1886 in Chicago, Illinois, and died in 1932, leaving behind a body of work that was small in quantity but unusually concentrated in feeling. Her name has never become as familiar as those of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, H. D., Amy Lowell, or Elinor Wylie, yet her poems belong to the same unsettled and fertile era in American writing. She wrote during the transition from late…

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Imagist Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

Elizabeth Devereux
Helen Dudley
1886 2023
Their lives did not overlap. 2 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 15,072 km separate Singapore from Chicago, Illinois, 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.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

From the biographies

social woman memory

Elizabeth Devereux: singapore, second world war, japanese invasion, boarding school, royal air force pilot, seville, unpublished poems, displacement. Helen Dudley: chicago, poems, 1919, imagism, harriet monroe, emotional reserve, lyric form, solitude.

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.

Invisible
Elizabeth Devereux
77%
Compare
To One Unknown
Helen Dudley
The Wealth of Nothing
Elizabeth Devereux
76%
Compare
To One Unknown
Helen Dudley

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Elizabeth Devereux: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace. Helen Dudley: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

Skip to main content