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


1649

Event dated 30 January 1649

War

Trial of Charles I

Poets involved

What happened

In London, King Charles I was tried before a specially convened High Court of Justice for treason against the realm, marking the first time a reigning English monarch was put on public trial. The court, whose legitimacy Charles refused to recognize, convicted him after he was removed from the proceedings for disruptive challenges to its authority. He was executed outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on January 30, 1649.

Literary impact

The trial and execution of Charles I generated an extraordinary body of poetry, from royalist elegies by Abraham Cowley and Katherine Philips to Milton's justificatory "Eikonoklastes." The event crystallized the poetics of political loyalty and loss, influencing the metaphysical poets' engagement with martyrdom and sovereignty, and the image of the martyr king haunted English verse for generations, shaping how poets from Marvell to T.S. Eliot addressed power and conscience.

Source: Wikipedia

Poets alive in 1649

41 poets

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