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

Wilfred Owen Wilfred Owen

Poet B

Isaac Rosenberg Isaac Rosenberg
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 77% Poems 88% Blended 82%
Swap sides Another related pair
Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen

18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918 (~25)
20 live poems · English

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house near Oswestry in Shropshire, on the borderland between England and Wales. He was the eldest of four children of Thomas Owen and Susan Shaw Owen; his siblings were Mary, Harold, and Colin. The family’s circumstances were respectable but precarious. Thomas had once been employed as a railway stationmaster, and Susan came from a family with str…

“My senses are charred. I shall feel again as soon as I dare, but now I must not.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg

25 November 1890 – 1 April 1918 (~28)
4 live poems · English

Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol on 25 November 1890 and killed in France on 1 April 1918, at the age of twenty-seven. His brief life has come to seem almost emblematic of a generation interrupted by the First World War, yet his achievement cannot be understood merely as the achievement of a “war poet.” Rosenberg was also a painter, draughtsman, reader, self-educator, son of Jewish immigrants, East End Londoner, a…

“I am not a poet, I am a painter.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Georgian Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Fear

In time

Wilfred Owen
Isaac Rosenberg
1890 1918
They overlapped for 26 years (1893–1918). When Wilfred Owen was born, Isaac Rosenberg was about 3.

On the map

About 159 km separate Oswestry, Shropshire, England from Bristol, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom, France.

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

first world war

Wilfred Owen: oswestry, shropshire, siegfried sassoon, dulce et decorum est, anthem for doomed youth, futility, strange meeting, disabled. Isaac Rosenberg: bristol, first world war, jewish immigrants, east end london, stepney, whitechapel, night and day, break of day in the trenches.

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.

Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen
84% death
Compare
Dead Man's Dump
Isaac Rosenberg
The Sentry
Wilfred Owen
82%
Compare
Dead Man's Dump
Isaac Rosenberg
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen
82% dead, death
Compare
Dead Man's Dump
Isaac Rosenberg
Spring Offensive
Wilfred Owen
82% life, death
Compare
Dead Man's Dump
Isaac Rosenberg
Apologia pro Poemate Meo
Wilfred Owen
82%
Compare
Dead Man's Dump
Isaac Rosenberg
The Dead-Beat
Wilfred Owen
82% dead, death
Compare
Dead Man's Dump
Isaac Rosenberg

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Wilfred Owen: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Isaac Rosenberg: Sorrow, Despair, Fear.

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