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

Common Things

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

27 June 1872 to 9 February 1906 (~34)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“I didn't start as a dialect poet. I simply came to the conclusion that I could write it as well, if not better, than anyone else I knew of, and that by doing so I should gain a hearing. I gained the hearing, and now they don't want me to write anything but dialect.”

Reflecting frustration at being typecast despite broader ambitions · Conversation with James Weldon Johnson

More remarks (10)

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. Herman Melville · −0.3175 − 0.6067i · 0.008 away · Compare side by side
  2. Anne Brontë · −0.3104 − 0.6090i · 0.014 away · Compare side by side
  3. Thomas Hood · −0.3106 − 0.6202i · 0.015 away · Compare side by side
  4. Nora Hopper Chesson · −0.3351 − 0.6298i · 0.021 away · Compare side by side
  5. Felicia Dorothea Hemans · −0.3386 − 0.5947i · 0.023 away · Compare side by side
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