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.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this 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


In their words — Ernst Stadler

16 remarks beyond the poems. Back to Ernst Stadler · All quotations

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Showing 4 of 4 matching remarks

“Again an open view of the French mountains. I greet France with almost the same emotion as when I first saw Paris seven years ago. I scarcely remember there is a war. I greet you, sweet soil of France.”

Original: Weiter freier Blick in die französ. Berge. Ich grüße Frankreich beinahe mit solcher Erschütterung wie damals, als ich vor 7 Jahren zum 1. Mal Paris sah. Ich denke kaum mehr, daß Krieg ist. Ich grüße Dich, süße Erde von Frankreich. — Written while serving as a German officer, it reveals his enduring emotional attachment to France despite the war · War diary, 10 August 1914 (German)

“I am astonished and delighted at once. I can hardly have deserved it: my military qualities are certainly not exceptional. I owe it chiefly to the captain's kindness.”

Original: Ich bin verwundert und beglückt zugleich. Habe es wohl kaum verdient: meine militärischen Qualitäten sind ja nicht exorbitant. Ich danke es wesentlich der Güte des Hauptmanns. — His modest and faintly ironic response to receiving the Iron Cross · War diary, 1 October 1914 (German)

“Or do I merely see things differently because I lack this kind of bravado, and can imagine and wish for another task in life than to let a shell tear me to pieces.”

Original: Oder sehe ich nur die Dinge anders, weil mir diese Art der Bravour abgeht und ich mir schließlich noch eine andere Aufgabe im Leben denke und wünsche, als mich von einer Granate in Stücke reißen zu lassen. — A stark statement of his desire for a life and purpose beyond warfare · Letter to Thea Sternheim from the front, early October 1914 (German)

“In the end one is too much a creature of nerves to possess the soldierly virtues which popular convention takes for granted and which perhaps really do exist.”

Original: Schließlich ist man doch zu sehr Nervenmensch um die Soldatentugenden zu besitzen, die der populären Convention als selbstverständlich gelten und die es vielleicht auch einmal da gibt. — A deeply personal rejection of conventional expectations of military heroism · Letter to Thea Sternheim from the front, early October 1914 (German)

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