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


1898

Event dated 19 May 1898

War

USS Oregon Completes Its Voyage Around Cape Horn

Poet involved

What happened

USS Oregon travelled from San Francisco around Cape Horn to Florida in 1898 as war with Spain approached. Its rapid 14,000-mile voyage attracted intense public attention and demonstrated the strategic difficulty of moving warships between the Pacific and Atlantic. The journey strengthened arguments for constructing the Panama Canal.

Literary impact

Joaquin Miller celebrated the battleship in The Oregon, treating its long passage as a national epic of machinery, ocean and speed. The poem reveals how late nineteenth-century verse transferred heroic qualities once assigned to sailors and sails onto industrial steel warships.

Source: Wikipedia

Poets alive in 1898

275 poets

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