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

Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe

Poet B

Charles Kingsley Charles Kingsley
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 55% Poems 83% Blended 68%
Swap sides Another related pair
Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

19 January 1809 – 7 October 1849 (~40)
18 live poems · English

Edgar Allan Poe stands as one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in American literature, a writer whose troubled life and haunting works have captivated readers for nearly two centuries. Born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, he would live only forty years before his mysterious death on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore, Maryland. Yet in that brief span, he revolutionized multiple litera…

“Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Decadent Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Charles Kingsley

Charles Kingsley

12 June 1819 – 23 January 1875 (~56)
2 live poems · English

Charles Kingsley was born on 12 June 1819 at Holne, a village on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, into a family whose circumstances, movements, religious commitments, and imaginative habits all helped to shape his career. He became one of the most conspicuous Victorian public intellectuals: an Anglican clergyman, novelist, poet, historian, lecturer, social reformer, controversialist, and writer for children. In his own…

“The men whom I have seen succeed best in life have always been cheerful and hopeful men.”

Neighbourhood: Children's Verse, Nature Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair

In time

Edgar Allan Poe
Charles Kingsley
1809 1875
They overlapped for 31 years (1819–1849). When Charles Kingsley was born, Edgar Allan Poe was about 10. Charles Kingsley was about 30 when Edgar Allan Poe died.

On the map

About 5,055 km separate Boston, Massachusetts, USA from Dean Prior, Devon, 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

Edgar Allan Poe: boston, richmond, baltimore, virginia clemm, john allan, tamerlane and other poems, the raven, the fall of the house of usher. Charles Kingsley: dartmoor, the water-babies, westward ho!, the heroes, christian socialism, frances eliza grenfell, yeast: a problem, alton locke, tailor and poet.

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.

The Forest Reverie
Edgar Allan Poe
75% world
Compare
The Sands of Dee
Charles Kingsley
The Forest Reverie
Edgar Allan Poe
74% world
Compare
Young and Old
Charles Kingsley
The Sleeper
Edgar Allan Poe
74% death, world
Compare
The Sands of Dee
Charles Kingsley
To One in Paradise
Edgar Allan Poe
74% world, death
Compare
The Sands of Dee
Charles Kingsley
A Dream within a Dream
Edgar Allan Poe
73%
Compare
The Sands of Dee
Charles Kingsley
Annabel Lee
Edgar Allan Poe
73% death
Compare
The Sands of Dee
Charles Kingsley

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Edgar Allan Poe: Sorrow, Longing, Despair. Charles Kingsley: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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