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.

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

T. S. Eliot T. S. Eliot

Poet B

Arthur Symons Arthur Symons
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 74% Poems 90% Blended 81%
Swap sides Another related pair
T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965 (~77)
14 live poems · English

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons

28 February 1865 – 22 January 1945 (~80)
23 live poems · English

Arthur Symons was born on 28 February 1865 at Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales, into a household shaped by religious discipline, frequent movement, and intellectual aspiration. He was the son of the Reverend Arthur Symons, a Wesleyan Methodist minister, and Mary Ann Symons. His father’s ministry required the family to move from place to place, and the boy’s childhood was therefore less rooted in one local communit…

“It is to call in a passing stranger and to say: Guard all my treasures while I sleep, for there is no certainty in the world beyond the certainty that I am I.”

Neighbourhood: Decadent Poets, Edwardian Poets, Symbolist Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder

In time

T. S. Eliot
Arthur Symons
1865 1965
They overlapped for 58 years (1888–1945). When T. S. Eliot was born, Arthur Symons was about 23. T. S. Eliot was about 57 when Arthur Symons died.

On the map

About 6,443 km separate St. Louis, Missouri, USA from Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Wales. 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

london

T. S. Eliot: st. louis, the waste land, prufrock and other observations, ezra pound, four quartets, vivienne haigh-wood, harvard university, sorbonne. Arthur Symons: milford haven, wales, reverend arthur symons, days and nights, silhouettes, london literary life, rhymers' club, w. b. yeats.

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.

Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
83%
Compare
L'Amour Par Terre
Arthur Symons
Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears
T. S. Eliot
81% eyes
Compare
Eyes
Arthur Symons
Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
81%
Compare
For a Picture of Watteau
Arthur Symons
Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
80%
Compare
The Last Exit
Arthur Symons
Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears
T. S. Eliot
80% eyes, memory
Compare
Her Street
Arthur Symons
Gerontion
T. S. Eliot
80%
Compare
The Blind Beggar
Arthur Symons

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

T. S. Eliot: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Arthur Symons: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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