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.

“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)

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…

More by Ernst Stadler

Poems by Ernst Stadler

All poems by this poet

More remarks by Ernst Stadler

“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)

“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)

All remarks by this poet

Poet page · All remarks · Quotations hub

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