A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

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.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. 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

Old Man Platypus

by Banjo Paterson

17 February 1864 to 5 February 1941 (~77)

Browse poets 678
In their words

“Military appointments were like the Order of the Garter — there was no damned merit about them.”

Mocking privilege and the absence of merit in military advancement · Boer War reminiscence

More remarks (19)

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. Francis Hastings Doyle · −0.4376 − 0.3415i · 0.016 away · Compare side by side
  2. Emily Dickinson · −0.4740 − 0.3492i · 0.024 away · Compare side by side
  3. Edward Shanks · −0.4408 − 0.3103i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  4. William Butler Yeats · −0.4273 − 0.3222i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
  5. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · −0.4736 − 0.3154i · 0.030 away · Compare side by side
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