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



Poem fractal

Soliloquy of Lazarus

by Theodore Tilton

2 October 1835 to 29 May 1907 (~72)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Mrs. Stowe, by Uncle Tom, helped the American Slave more than any one human being ever did before.”

Crediting fiction with a moral force no sermon had matched in the fight against slavery · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, about 1861

More remarks (4)

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. William Soutar · −0.1149 + 0.6672i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. Edna St. Vincent Millay · −0.1033 + 0.6564i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge · −0.1204 + 0.6616i · 0.010 away · Compare side by side
  4. Edwin J. Ellis · −0.1203 + 0.6568i · 0.011 away · Compare side by side
  5. William Wordsworth · −0.1160 + 0.6508i · 0.012 away · Compare side by side
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