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.

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



1870

Event dated September 1870

HMS Captain Capsizes in the Bay of Biscay

What happened

The turret ship HMS Captain capsized during a gale in the Bay of Biscay in September 1870. Its dangerously low freeboard and excessive top weight contributed to the disaster. Nearly 500 people died, including the ship's designer, Captain Cowper Phipps Coles.

Literary impact

The loss prompted elegiac and commemorative poems that questioned the cost of technological ambition and official prestige. It supplied Victorian poets with a modern variation on hubris: an innovative warship destroyed by defects that critics had already identified.

Source: Wikipedia

Poets alive in 1870

199 poets

More events in 1870

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