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

Matthew Arnold Matthew Arnold

Poet B

Bret Harte Bret Harte
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% Poems 80% Blended 70%
Swap sides Another related pair
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…

“Culture is a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.”

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

Bret Harte

25 August 1836 – 5 May 1902 (~66)
3 live poems · English

Francis Bret Harte, born Francis Brett Hart on 25 August 1836 in Albany, New York, and dead on 5 May 1902 in Camberley, Surrey, England, was the first American writer to make the Gold Rush West seem not merely picturesque or exotic but worthy of a literature of its own. Before Harte, the Pacific frontier had often appeared in Eastern writing as a distant field of adventure, speculation, and caricature. Harte helped g…

“It was a large, contagious joke, passed from journal to journal in a peculiar cyclonic Western fashion.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Folk & Ballad Poets, Light Verse Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Irony

In time

Matthew Arnold
Bret Harte
1822 1902
They overlapped for 53 years (1836–1888). When Bret Harte was born, Matthew Arnold was about 14. Bret Harte was about 52 when Matthew Arnold died.

On the map

About 5,402 km separate Laleham, Middlesex, England from Albany, New York, USA. 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

Matthew Arnold: laleham, rugby school, thomas arnold, frances lucy wightman, the forsaken merman, sohrab and rustum, the scholar-gipsy, empedocles on etna. Bret Harte: albany, new york, camberley, surrey, gold rush, overland monthly, the luck of roaring camp, the outcasts of poker flat, anna griswold, samuel clemens.

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.

Youth's Agitations
Matthew Arnold
76%
Compare
Twenty Years
Bret Harte
Despondency
Matthew Arnold
74%
Compare
Twenty Years
Bret Harte
Youth and Calm
Matthew Arnold
74%
Compare
Twenty Years
Bret Harte
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold
74% world
Compare
Twenty Years
Bret Harte
Self-Dependence
Matthew Arnold
70% world
Compare
Twenty Years
Bret Harte
Revolutions
Matthew Arnold
70%
Compare
Twenty Years
Bret Harte

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Matthew Arnold: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Bret Harte: Sorrow, Longing, Irony.

Skip to main content