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


1846

Event dated 25 June 1846

Economy Geopolitics Culture

Repeal of Corn Laws and Free Trade Victory

Poet involved

What happened

British Parliament repealed tariffs on imported grain after intense campaigning by Anti-Corn Law League manufacturers and Irish Famine urgency, marking triumph of free-trade ideology over landed protectionism. This policy shift lowered food prices but devastated domestic agriculture, accelerating rural depopulation and urban industrial growth. Repeal symbolized the transfer of political power from aristocratic landowners to industrial capitalists and middle-class consumers.

Literary impact

Chartist poets like Ernest Jones and Thomas Cooper wrote verses celebrating repeal as victory for working-class affordability while warning against capitalist exploitation replacing aristocratic privilege. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh engages debates about women's economic dependence amid shifting agricultural and industrial economies. Victorian pastoral nostalgia intensified as free trade transformed countryside landscapes that poets had previously idealized.

Source: Wikipedia

Poets alive in 1846

162 poets

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