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

Thomas Hood Thomas Hood

Poet B

A.E.Housman A.E.Housman
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 75% Poems 92% Blended 82%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Hood

Thomas Hood

23 May 1799 – 3 May 1845 (~46)
25 live poems · English

Thomas Hood was born in London on 23 May 1799 and died there on 3 May 1845, only twenty days short of his forty-sixth birthday. He occupies a distinctive, sometimes deceptively difficult place in English literary history. To generations of readers he has been the author of jokes, puns, comic ballads, and apparently effortless verbal absurdities; to others he is the compassionate author of “The Song of the Shirt” and…

“I have never had a day's health in my life, but I have had several days of illness.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
A.E.Housman

A.E.Housman

26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936 (~77)
19 live poems · English

Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26 March 1859 at Valley House, Fockbury, a small hamlet near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, England, and died in Cambridge on 30 April 1936. He became, by way of an unusually divided life, both one of the most recognizable lyric poets in English and one of the most formidable classical scholars of his generation. The apparent contrast between these identities has long fascinated reade…

“Textual criticism is a science, and, since it comprises recension and emendation, it is also an art.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair

In time

Thomas Hood
A.E.Housman
1799 1936
Their lives did not overlap. 14 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.

On the map

About 165 km separate The Poultry, Cheapside, London from Fockbury, Worcestershire, England. Both have ground in England.

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

Thomas Hood: london, the song of the shirt, the bridge of sighs, j. h. reynolds, whims and oddities, the dream of eugene aram, faithless sally brown, the plea of the midsummer fairies. A.E.Housman: fockbury, bromsgrove, moses jackson, a shropshire lad, loveliest of trees, to an athlete dying young, when i was one-and-twenty, classical scholar.

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 Foresaken
Thomas Hood
83% love
Compare
Oh, when I was in love with you
A.E.Housman
Death
Thomas Hood
82% death
Compare
With rue my heart is laden
A.E.Housman
The Death Bed
Thomas Hood
82%
Compare
Be still, my soul
A.E.Housman
Silence
Thomas Hood
81% consciousness, self, world
Compare
Be still, my soul
A.E.Housman
The Death Bed
Thomas Hood
81% death
Compare
With rue my heart is laden
A.E.Housman
To an Absentee
Thomas Hood
81% love
Compare
Oh, when I was in love with you
A.E.Housman

The world around them

Emotional landscapes

Thomas Hood: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. A.E.Housman: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.

Compare their emotional landscapes
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