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

Henry Vaughan Henry Vaughan

Poet B

Mary Monck Mary Monck
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 66% Blended 66%
Swap sides Another related pair
Henry Vaughan

Henry Vaughan

17 April 1621 – 23 April 1695 (~74)
2 live poems · English

Henry Vaughan, born on 17 April 1621 and buried on 23 April 1695, was one of the most distinctive English-language poets of the seventeenth century: a Welsh country gentleman, Royalist, medical practitioner, translator, religious writer, and visionary poet whose work transformed private devotion into startling images of light, landscape, childhood, death, and eternity. He is usually grouped with the metaphysical poet…

“He that writes idle books, makes for himself another body, in which he always lives, and sins—after death—as fast and as foul as ever he did in his life.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Spirituality, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities
Mary Monck

Mary Monck

c. 1677 – 1715 (~38)
1 live poem · English

Mary Monck, born Mary Molesworth about 1677 and dead in 1715, belongs to that important company of early modern women poets whose achievement was more substantial than their later reputation long allowed. She wrote at the meeting point of Restoration wit, Augustan order, religious meditation, private elegy, and the expanding culture of literary translation. Her surviving work is not vast, and its circumstances of pre…

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Irish Poets, Love Poets, Restoration Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Henry Vaughan
Mary Monck
1621 1715
They overlapped for 19 years (1677–1695). When Mary Monck was born, Henry Vaughan was about 56. Mary Monck was about 18 when Henry Vaughan died.
Henry Vaughan in history Mary Monck in history Years they were given

On the map

About 264 km separate Llansantffraed, Brecknockshire, Wales from Dublin, Ireland. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

Henry Vaughan

Mary Monck

Open both on the History Atlas

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

life love

Henry Vaughan only

divine grace spiritual self devotional plant fruit idle winter soul follies youth

Mary Monck only

death husband religious farewell suffering pain

From the biographies

Henry Vaughan: breconshire, newton-upon-usk, catherine wise, thomas vaughan, george herbert, the temple, silex scintillans, the world. Mary Monck: anglo-irish society, robert molesworth, letitia coote, george monck, verses wrote on her death-bed at bath, restoration wit, augustan order, literary translation.

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.

Idle Verse
Henry Vaughan
73%
Compare
Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath
Mary Monck
Unprofitableness
Henry Vaughan
73% life, love
Compare
Verses Written on her Death-Bed at Bath
Mary Monck

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1677 Baruch Spinoza Publishes 'Ethics'
1677 Racine's Phèdre premieres in Paris
1680 Kirch's Comet and Isaac Newton
1680 Publication of 'The Orphan'
1682 Halley's Comet of 1682
1689 Matsuo Bashō begins the journey later told in Oku no Hosomichi
1689 Matsuo Bashō's Journey to the Northern Provinces
1694 Matsuo Bashō dies

Henry Vaughan

1638 Education at Jesus College, Oxford
1646 Publication of 'Poems, with the tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished'
1647 Death of Younger Brother William
1650 Publication of 'Silex Scintillans'
1651 Publication of 'Olor Iscanus'
1652 Publication of 'The Mount of Olives'
1655 Enlargement of 'Silex Scintillans'
1660 Death of First Wife Catherine

Mary Monck

1680 Education at Home
1685 Influence of Father on Literary Development
1697 Marriage of Mary Monck
1700 Death of George Monck
1701 Publication of 'On the Death of my Dear Husband'
1705 Involvement in Literary Circles
1714 Move to Bath
1715 Publication of 'Verses Wrote on her Death-Bed at Bath'

Emotional landscapes

Henry Vaughan: Despair, Spirituality, Longing. Mary Monck: Sorrow, Tenderness, Longing.

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