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


1720

Event dated September 1720

Economy Culture

South Sea Bubble Financial Crisis

Poets involved

What happened

Speculative mania surrounding the South Sea Company's monopoly on slave trading collapsed when inflated share prices proved unsustainable, ruining thousands of investors including prominent intellectuals. The crisis exposed vulnerabilities in Britain's nascent financial system and revealed how easily public trust could be manipulated through promotional rhetoric. Parliamentary investigations and subsequent regulations attempted to restore confidence in joint-stock corporations and government debt.

Literary impact

Alexander Pope's Dunciad and Moral Essays satirized financial speculation as symptomatic of cultural decline, equating stock-jobbing with literary hack-work and false taste. Jonathan Swift attacked paper credit and speculative finance in Gulliver's Travels and pamphlets, defending tangible value against abstract monetary fictions. The bubble reinforced Augustan poets' commitment to classical stability against modern commercial volatility.

Source: Wikipedia

Poets alive in 1720

23 poets

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