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

Humbert Wolfe Humbert Wolfe

Poet B

Gerald Gould Gerald Gould
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 76% Poems 85% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Humbert Wolfe

Humbert Wolfe

5 January 1885 – 5 January 1940 (~55)
3 live poems · English

On the fifth of January 1885, in the bustling commercial heart of Milan, a child was born who would become one of Britain's most popular poets of the 1920s, yet whose name today is remembered primarily for a single, sardonic epigram. Humbert Wolfe was born as Umberto Wolff in Milan, Italy, to Martin Wolff, a German Jewish merchant, and Consuela Terraccini, an Italian Jew. This dual heritage, straddling Germanic and M…

“You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Modernist Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow
Gerald Gould

Gerald Gould

9 April 1885 – 2 November 1936 (~51)
2 live poems · English

In the landscape of early twentieth-century English poetry, Gerald Gould occupies a curious position—too well-known to have been forgotten entirely, yet too overlooked to claim his rightful place in the literary canon. Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1885 and raised in Norwich, Gould lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in British history, a time when the certainties of the Victorian age gave way to the…

“The civilisation and social structure of our country, rightly or wrongly, take for granted that a few people shall have a lot of money and a lot of power, and a great many people very little money and very little power.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Love Poets, Modernist Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality

In time

Humbert Wolfe
Gerald Gould
1885 1940
They overlapped for 52 years (1885–1936). They were born in the same year. Humbert Wolfe was about 51 when Gerald Gould died.

On the map

About 1,195 km separate Milan, Lombardy, Italy from Scarborough, 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

social

Humbert Wolfe: milan, bradford, wadham college, london sonnets, lampoons, requiem, requiem: the soldier, kensington gardens. Gerald Gould: norwich, barbara ayrton, georgian poet, lyrics, an essay on the nature of lyric, united suffragists, men's league for women's suffrage, the happy tree and other poems.

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.

Love
Humbert Wolfe
79% love
Compare
The Spell
Gerald Gould
The Song
Humbert Wolfe
79%
Compare
Wander-Thirst
Gerald Gould
The Song
Humbert Wolfe
77%
Compare
The Spell
Gerald Gould
Love
Humbert Wolfe
74%
Compare
Wander-Thirst
Gerald Gould
Iliad
Humbert Wolfe
73% love
Compare
The Spell
Gerald Gould
Iliad
Humbert Wolfe
69%
Compare
Wander-Thirst
Gerald Gould

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Humbert Wolfe: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow. Gerald Gould: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality.

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