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

Farewell to Love

by Thomas Campbell

27 July 1777 to 15 June 1844 (~67)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Now Barabbas was a publisher.”

A wry jab at the commercial side of literature, playing on the biblical robber · Attributed remark (commonly linked to Campbell; also claimed for Byron, but Smiles records it of Campbell)

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. Thomas Babington Macaulay · 0.0044 + 1.0617i · 0.036 away · Compare side by side
  2. D. H. Lawrence · 0.0030 + 1.1387i · 0.042 away · Compare side by side
  3. Walt Whitman · −0.0394 + 1.0690i · 0.058 away · Compare side by side
  4. John Townsend Trowbridge · −0.0151 + 1.0360i · 0.067 away · Compare side by side
  5. Dylan Thomas · −0.0579 + 1.1305i · 0.076 away · Compare side by side
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