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


Ernst Stadler — a remark

From the V2Melody quotations library — share the card, then explore the poet and poems below.

“But the younger generation, further removed from memories of war and less inclined to uncompromising partisanship, turns the old hardship into a new virtue and seeks to embrace both elements within itself, with the ideal of a future synthesis always before it.”

Original: Aber die junge Generation, der Kriegserinnerung ferner, weniger geneigt zu der Unbedingtheit ausgesprochener Parteinahme, schafft sich aus der alten Not eine neue Tugend und sucht beide Elemente in sich zu fassen, immer das Ideal einer zukünftig zu vollziehenden Synthese vor Augen. — Sets out Stadler's hope that Alsace might reconcile rather than choose between German and French cultu… · Essay, Ein Wunsch, 1911 (German)

Ernst Stadler

About Ernst Stadler

Ernst Stadler

11 August 1883–30 October 1914

Ernst Stadler was born on 11 August 1883 in Colmar, in Alsace, and was killed on 30 October 1914 near Zandvoorde in Flanders during the First World War. His life lasted little more than thirty-one years, and the body of poetry on which his reputation rests is correspondingly small. Yet his importance in…

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Poems by Ernst Stadler

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More remarks by Ernst Stadler

“Taking sides always offers security, reassurance, support. But those who suffer most deeply are those who stand amid the struggle, whose more sensitive conscience cannot take sides unconditionally.”

Original: Partei ist immer Sicherung, Beruhigung, Rückhalt. Aber die am tiefsten Leidenden sind diejenigen, die inmitten des Kampfes stehen, und deren sensibleres Gewissen es doch nicht vermag, bedinglos Partei zu nehmen. — Captures the moral difficulty of belonging in a region divided between competing national identities · Review concerning Hans Karl Abel's Die Elsässische Tragödie, 1911 (German)

All remarks by this poet

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