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

Emily Brontë Emily Brontë

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.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 58% Poems 86% Blended 71%
Swap sides Another related pair
Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë

30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848 (~30)
11 live poems · English

Emily Jane Brontë was born on 30 July 1818 at Thornton, near Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and died on 19 December 1848 at Haworth, Yorkshire. She lived only thirty years, published one novel and a small body of verse during her lifetime, travelled little, and left behind few direct explanations of herself. Yet the apparent narrowness of her outward life stands in startling contrast to the imaginative sca…

“At length my body and my spirit were weary of wandering; my bark was tossed by storms, I longed to come into port.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality
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…

“Literature is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.”

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

In time

Emily Brontë
Matthew Arnold
1818 1888
They overlapped for 27 years (1822–1848). When Matthew Arnold was born, Emily Brontë was about 4. Matthew Arnold was about 26 when Emily Brontë died.

On the map

About 281 km separate Thornton, Yorkshire, England from Laleham, Middlesex, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

social

Emily Brontë: wuthering heights, haworth, yorkshire moors, patrick brontë, charlotte brontë, anne brontë, gondal, poems by currer, ellis, and acton bell. 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.

Remembrance
Emily Brontë
81% death, life, dead, world
Compare
Requiescat
Matthew Arnold
My Lady's Grave
Emily Brontë
78% death, life, world
Compare
Requiescat
Matthew Arnold
Faith and Despondency
Emily Brontë
78% faith
Compare
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold
My Lady's Grave
Emily Brontë
78% grave, death, life
Compare
Youth and Calm
Matthew Arnold
Faith and Despondency
Emily Brontë
78% despondency
Compare
Despondency
Matthew Arnold
Remembrance
Emily Brontë
77% love, world
Compare
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Emily Brontë: Longing, Sorrow, Spirituality. Matthew Arnold: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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