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

Robert Bridges Robert Bridges

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 70% Poems 83% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
Robert Bridges

Robert Bridges

23 October 1844 – 21 April 1930 (~86)
4 live poems · English

Robert Seymour Bridges was born on 23 October 1844 at Walmer, near Deal in Kent, into a prosperous and cultivated English family whose security gave him both educational opportunity and, eventually, the independence to pursue literature without needing to earn his living from it. He was the fourth son of John Thomas Bridges and Harriet Elizabeth Bridges. His father had served in the navy and later held administrative…

“All Art, we said, was the expression of Ideas in a sensuous medium. Now Words, the medium of Poetry, actually are Ideas.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
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

Robert Bridges
Gerald Gould
1844 1936
They overlapped for 46 years (1885–1930). When Gerald Gould was born, Robert Bridges was about 41. Gerald Gould was about 45 when Robert Bridges died.

On the map

About 363 km separate Walmer, Kent, England from Scarborough, 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

lyrics social

Robert Bridges: walmer, eton college, corpus christi college, gerard manley hopkins, the growth of love, london snow, st bartholomew's hospital, hospital for sick children. 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.

Wooing
Robert Bridges
78% love
Compare
The Spell
Gerald Gould
Clear and Gentle Stream
Robert Bridges
76%
Compare
Wander-Thirst
Gerald Gould
Clear and Gentle Stream
Robert Bridges
73%
Compare
The Spell
Gerald Gould
Wooing
Robert Bridges
72%
Compare
Wander-Thirst
Gerald Gould
The Windmill
Robert Bridges
70% world
Compare
Wander-Thirst
Gerald Gould
Winter Nightfall
Robert Bridges
69% world
Compare
Wander-Thirst
Gerald Gould

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Robert Bridges: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. Gerald Gould: Longing, Wonder, Spirituality.

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