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

William Hughes Mearns William Hughes Mearns

Poet B

Arthur O'Shaughnessy Arthur O'Shaughnessy
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 71% Poems 82% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Hughes Mearns

William Hughes Mearns

28 September 1875 – 13 March 1965 (~90)
2 live poems · English

William Hughes Mearns entered the world on September 28, 1875, in the bustling streets of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of James H. Mearns and Lelia Cora Evans. From his very first breaths in that vibrant Quaker City, young William—soon to be known simply as Hughes Mearns—seemed destined to bridge the realms of imagination and instruction. He would grow into a man who taught the world not merely how to write, b…

“You have something to say, something that no one else in the world has said in just your way of saying it.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Children's Verse, Edwardian Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Wonder, Fear
Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

14 March 1844 – 30 January 1881 (~37)
20 live poems · English

Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1844 and died there on 30 January 1881, at the age of thirty-six. His life was brief, financially constrained, and repeatedly shadowed by bereavement, yet it produced a body of verse whose finest passages have retained an unusual power. He belongs to that fertile, sometimes neglected region of Victorian poetry situated between the late Romantics, the P…

“Love appears to me, indeed, as the offer of heaven.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

William Hughes Mearns
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
1844 1965
They overlapped for 7 years (1875–1881). When William Hughes Mearns was born, Arthur O'Shaughnessy was about 31. William Hughes Mearns was about 6 when Arthur O'Shaughnessy died.

On the map

About 5,686 km separate Camden, New Jersey, USA from Ealing, London, 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

William Hughes Mearns: philadelphia, bearsville, the pedagogue, harvard university, john dewey, creative youth, u.s. army medical corps, the little man who wasn't there. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: victorian london, irish descent, epic of women, lays of france, dante gabriel rossetti, pre-raphaelite movement, albert günther, eleanor marston.

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.

Antigonish
William Hughes Mearns
76% life
Compare
Thought
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Antigonish
William Hughes Mearns
75%
Compare
If She But Knew
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Antigonish
William Hughes Mearns
75% life
Compare
A Life-Tomb
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Antigonish
William Hughes Mearns
75% life
Compare
Death
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Antigonish
William Hughes Mearns
74% life
Compare
Love After Death
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Antigonish
William Hughes Mearns
73%
Compare
Silences
Arthur O'Shaughnessy

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

William Hughes Mearns: Irony, Wonder, Fear. Arthur O'Shaughnessy: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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