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

Charlotte Brontë Charlotte Brontë

Poet B

John Burroughs John Burroughs
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.

Somewhat related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 48% Blended 48%
Swap sides Another related pair
Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë

21 April 1816 – 31 March 1855 (~39)
7 live poems · English

Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 at Thornton, near Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the third surviving child of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell Brontë. She died on 31 March 1855, not yet thirty-nine years old, after creating a body of work that transformed the English novel. Though chiefly celebrated as a novelist, she began as a poet, wrote poetry throughout her life, and brought a poet’s inten…

“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Love Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder
John Burroughs

John Burroughs

3 April 1837 – 29 March 1921 (~84)
1 live poem · English

On a spring morning in the Catskill Mountains, an elderly man with a flowing white beard sits beneath a gnarled apple tree, notebook in hand, watching a hermit thrush build its nest. This is John Burroughs in his element—not in a library or lecture hall, but in the cathedral of nature itself. For more than six decades, Burroughs served as America's interpreter of the natural world, transforming simple observations of…

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Nature Poets, Transcendentalists, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Spirituality, Joy

In time

Charlotte Brontë
John Burroughs
1816 1921
They overlapped for 19 years (1837–1855). When John Burroughs was born, Charlotte Brontë was about 21. John Burroughs was about 18 when Charlotte Brontë died.

On the map

About 5,306 km separate Thornton, Yorkshire, England from Roxbury, New York, USA. 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

Charlotte Brontë: thornton, bradford, jane eyre, villette, patrick brontë, maria branwell brontë, angrian chronicles, gondal. John Burroughs: catskill mountains, roxbury, new york, walt whitman, ralph waldo emerson, wake-robin, slabsides, riverby, theodore roosevelt.

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.

Parting
Charlotte Brontë
73%
Compare
Waiting
John Burroughs
When Thou Sleepest
Charlotte Brontë
72% self
Compare
Waiting
John Burroughs
Life
Charlotte Brontë
71% life
Compare
Waiting
John Burroughs
Watching and Wishing
Charlotte Brontë
70% self
Compare
Waiting
John Burroughs
Speak of the North! A lonely moor
Charlotte Brontë
69% life
Compare
Waiting
John Burroughs
The Letter
Charlotte Brontë
69%
Compare
Waiting
John Burroughs

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Charlotte Brontë: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder. John Burroughs: Peace, Spirituality, Joy.

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