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

Charles Harding Firth Charles Harding Firth
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 63% Blended 63%
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…

“Of this I am certain you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Edwardian Poets, Political Poets, War Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Charles Harding Firth

Charles Harding Firth

16 March 1857 – 19 February 1936 (~79)
1 live poem · English

Charles Harding Firth was born in Sheffield on 16 March 1857, into a family whose prosperity, civic conscience, and intellectual ambitions helped to shape his future. His father, Mark Firth, was a prominent steel manufacturer, philanthropist, and public figure whose wealth was tied to the industrial transformation of nineteenth-century Sheffield. Yet the younger Firth’s enduring interests lay not in the furnaces and…

“Only those endure in which the matter is so solid and the form so perfect, and both so harmoniously united, that they still satisfy and charm, and seem to triumph over time.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing

In time

Wilfred Owen
Charles Harding Firth
1857 1936
They overlapped for 26 years (1893–1918). When Wilfred Owen was born, Charles Harding Firth was about 36. Charles Harding Firth was about 61 when Wilfred Owen died.

On the map

About 121 km separate Oswestry, Shropshire, England from Sheffield, 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.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

From the biographies

Wilfred Owen: oswestry, shropshire, siegfried sassoon, dulce et decorum est, anthem for doomed youth, futility, strange meeting, disabled. Charles Harding Firth: sheffield, mark firth, english civil war, oliver cromwell, the rule of the puritans, samuel rawson gardiner, clifton college, new college oxford.

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 Send-Off
Wilfred Owen
75%
Compare
The British Tars
Charles Harding Firth
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen
75%
Compare
The British Tars
Charles Harding Firth
The Sentry
Wilfred Owen
74%
Compare
The British Tars
Charles Harding Firth
The Dead-Beat
Wilfred Owen
74%
Compare
The British Tars
Charles Harding Firth
Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen
74%
Compare
The British Tars
Charles Harding Firth
Disabled
Wilfred Owen
73% social
Compare
The British Tars
Charles Harding Firth

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Wilfred Owen: Sorrow, Despair, Irony. Charles Harding Firth: Sorrow, Despair, Longing.

Skip to main content