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

C. P. Cavafy C. P. Cavafy
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 61% Blended 61%
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…

“Catalogue? Photograph? Can you photograph the crimson-hot iron as it cools from the smelting? That is what Jones's blood looked like, and felt like. My senses are charred.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
C. P. Cavafy

C. P. Cavafy

29 April 1863 – 29 April 1933 (~70)
1 live poem · Greek

Constantine Peter Cavafy, universally known as C. P. Cavafy, was born Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis in Alexandria, Egypt, on 29 April 1863, and died there on 29 April 1933, his seventieth birthday. The coincidence has naturally encouraged a Cavafian reading of his life: a date returning with a measured inevitability, an ending that seems to complete a private design. Yet Cavafy’s achievement was anything but neat or pr…

“I am not a poet. I am a historian.”

Neighbourhood: Greek Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Despair, Sorrow, Longing

In time

Wilfred Owen
C. P. Cavafy
1863 1933
They overlapped for 26 years (1893–1918). When Wilfred Owen was born, C. P. Cavafy was about 30. C. P. Cavafy was about 55 when Wilfred Owen died.

On the map

About 3,579 km separate Oswestry, Shropshire, England from Alexandria, Egypt. 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

desire

Wilfred Owen: oswestry, shropshire, siegfried sassoon, dulce et decorum est, anthem for doomed youth, futility, strange meeting, disabled. C. P. Cavafy: alexandria, greek diaspora, anglo-egyptian war, peter john cavafy, haricleia georgaki cavafy, the god abandons antony, waiting for the barbarians, che fece... il gran rifiuto.

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.

The Sentry
Wilfred Owen
69%
Compare
Walls (Τείχη)
C. P. Cavafy
Conscious
Wilfred Owen
68% world
Compare
Walls (Τείχη)
C. P. Cavafy
The Dead-Beat
Wilfred Owen
67%
Compare
Walls (Τείχη)
C. P. Cavafy
Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen
66%
Compare
Walls (Τείχη)
C. P. Cavafy
The End
Wilfred Owen
66% world
Compare
Walls (Τείχη)
C. P. Cavafy
The Send-Off
Wilfred Owen
66% world
Compare
Walls (Τείχη)
C. P. Cavafy

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Wilfred Owen: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. C. P. Cavafy: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.

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