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.

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


Compare Poets

Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.

Poet A

Francis Hastings Doyle Francis Hastings Doyle

Poet B

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Compare two related contemporaries

A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 74% Poems 88% Blended 80%
Swap sides Another related pair
Francis Hastings Doyle

Francis Hastings Doyle

21 August 1810 – 8 June 1888 (~78)
3 live poems · English

Francis Hastings Doyle, born on 21 August 1810 and dead on 8 June 1888, belonged to that characteristic Victorian class of cultivated public men for whom poetry was not an isolated vocation but one element in a life shaped by education, law, inherited social position, public duty, and moral reflection. He was a barrister, a baronet, an Oxford professor, and a poet whose best-known verses entered the popular bloodstre…

“When anyone, as I am now doing, approaches the age of seventy-four, he ought to be able to tell his juniors something worth listening to.”

Neighbourhood: Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow
Listen Timeline Affinities
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

27 February 1807 – 24 March 1882 (~75)
69 live poems · English

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on 27 February 1807 in Portland, Maine, then a bustling coastal town in Massachusetts, and died on 24 March 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During his lifetime he became, by a considerable margin, the most famous American poet of the nineteenth century. His verses were memorized in schools, recited in parlors, printed in newspapers, sung, parodied, and carried across the Atlantic…

“The heart, like the mind, has a memory. And in it are kept the most precious keepsakes of the past.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Devotional Poets, Hymn Writers, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Transcendentalists
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Francis Hastings Doyle
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1807 1888
They overlapped for 73 years (1810–1882). When Francis Hastings Doyle was born, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was about 3. Francis Hastings Doyle was about 72 when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow died.
Francis Hastings Doyle in history Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in history Years they were given

On the map

About 4,972 km separate Nunappleton, Yorkshire from Portland, Maine, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Francis Hastings Doyle

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Open both on the History Atlas

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

Shared

death life love suffering

Francis Hastings Doyle only

doyle soldier courage imperial rose sympathy diamonds gift stoic duty pain belief

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow only

world nature memory divine grief spiritual loss beauty harvest voice history light

From the biographies

Francis Hastings Doyle: victorian ideals, the private of the buffs, sir francis hastings doyle, barrister, oxford professor, balliol college, eton, the duke of monmouth. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: portland maine, bowdoin college, nathaniel hawthorne, frances appleton, paul revere’s ride, the village blacksmith, the song of hiawatha, outre-mer.

Poems that secretly rhyme

The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.

The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
80% soldier, death
Compare
Killed at the Ford
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
79% death
Compare
The Cumberland
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
78% suffering, pain, life, light
Compare
The Goblet of Life
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
77%
Compare
A Gleam of Sunshine
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
77% life, light
Compare
Weariness
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
77% life
Compare
The Goblet of Life
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1812 French Invasion of Russia Begins
1812 Publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Cantos I and II
1812 The Harrowing Retreat from Moscow
1813 Imprisonment in Surrey Gaol
1815 1815 Tambora Eruption
1816 Byron and Lady Byron Separate
1816 The Year Without a Summer
1819 Shelley Writes Ode to the West Wind

Francis Hastings Doyle

1837 Marriage to Frances Mary Wellesley
1848 Death of his father, Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Hastings Doyle
1852 Publication of 'The Battle of the Baltic'
1855 Publication of 'The Return of the Guards'
1857 Appointment as Professor of Poetry at Oxford
1858 Publication of 'The Siege of Lucknow'
1864 Publication of 'The Poetical Works of Francis Hastings Doyle'
1865 Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

1821 Longfellow Enters Bowdoin College
1826 Longfellow's First European Sojourn
1831 Marriage to Mary Storer Potter
1835 Death of First Wife Mary Potter Longfellow
1836 Appointment to Harvard Professorship
1839 Publication of Voices of the Night
1843 Marriage to Frances 'Fanny' Appleton
1861 Death of Second Wife Fanny Appleton Longfellow

Emotional landscapes

Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Spirituality, Longing, Wonder.

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