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

Francis Ledwidge Francis Ledwidge
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 88% Blended 81%
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…

“I go out of this year a Poet, my dear Mother, as which I did not enter it. I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet's poet.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Francis Ledwidge

Francis Ledwidge

19 August 1887 – 31 July 1917 (~30)
8 live poems · English

In the annals of Irish literature, few figures embody the tragic intersection of artistic promise and historical circumstance as poignantly as Francis Edward Ledwidge. Born into rural poverty in County Meath in 1887 and killed on a Belgian battlefield in 1917, Ledwidge's thirty years encompassed a meteoric rise from agricultural laborer to celebrated poet, a journey that mirrors the broader struggles of Ireland durin…

“She taught me to listen and appreciate the blackbird's song and when I grew to love it beyond all others she said it was because I was born in a blackbird's nest.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Georgian Poets, Irish Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Wonder

In time

Wilfred Owen
Francis Ledwidge
1887 1918
They overlapped for 25 years (1893–1917). When Wilfred Owen was born, Francis Ledwidge was about 6. Wilfred Owen was about 24 when Francis Ledwidge died.

On the map

About 250 km separate Oswestry, Shropshire, England from Slane, County Meath, Ireland. 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

Wilfred Owen: oswestry, shropshire, siegfried sassoon, dulce et decorum est, anthem for doomed youth, futility, strange meeting, disabled. Francis Ledwidge: county meath, slane, lord dunsany, thomas macdonagh, songs of the fields, songs of peace, irish cultural revival, gallipoli peninsula.

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.

From My Diary, July 1914
Wilfred Owen
80% world, nature
Compare
An Invitation
Francis Ledwidge
The Send-Off
Wilfred Owen
80% soldiers, military, world
Compare
In a Cafe
Francis Ledwidge
Elegy in April and September
Wilfred Owen
79% world
Compare
An Invitation
Francis Ledwidge
Elegy in April and September
Wilfred Owen
78% world
Compare
The Sister
Francis Ledwidge
Spring Offensive
Wilfred Owen
77% soldiers, world, military
Compare
In a Cafe
Francis Ledwidge
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen
77%
Compare
The Irish in Gallipoli
Francis Ledwidge

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Wilfred Owen: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Francis Ledwidge: Tenderness, Longing, Wonder.

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