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.

After the death of my mother, 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.

My wife and I are simplifying our days. The server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit the quieter life we want.

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.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard



Poem fractal

To a Child

by Joanna Baillie

11 September 1762 to 23 February 1851 (~89)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“There is, perhaps, no employment which the human mind will with so much avidity pursue, as the discovery of concealed passion, as the tracing the varieties and progress of a perturbed soul.”

She names hidden passion as the true subject of tragedy · Introductory Discourse, A Series of Plays, 1798

More remarks (20)

Drawing the boundary…

Read the poem Another poem

A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. A poem can be drawn the same way.

The poem’s constant is read from the build of its lines: their length, the size of the stanzas, and the share of vowels. Poems whose constants lie closer together are built more alike. The same poem always draws the same picture. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.

Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.

Poems nearby in the constant

A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.

  1. Bayard Taylor · −0.4782 − 0.4347i · 0.005 away · Compare side by side
  2. William Wordsworth · −0.4948 − 0.4249i · 0.018 away · Compare side by side
  3. Banjo Paterson · −0.4895 − 0.4156i · 0.019 away · Compare side by side
  4. Richard Aldington · −0.4533 − 0.4359i · 0.025 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Blake · −0.4992 − 0.4570i · 0.035 away · Compare side by side
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