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

William Philpot William Philpot

Poet B

Francis Hastings Doyle Francis Hastings Doyle
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 76% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
William Philpot

William Philpot

16 April 1823 – 16 April 1889 (~66)
1 live poem · English

William Philpot was born on 16 April 1823 and died on 16 April 1889, completing a life of exactly sixty-six years. His career belongs to the enormous, uneven, and still incompletely recovered field of nineteenth-century poetry: the work of writers who published in small editions, contributed to local or denominational periodicals, read before societies, circulated manuscripts among friends, or gained recognition with…

“Business is a kind of material body without which the spiritual life is a kind of ghost. In the perfect life they are essential to each other.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Listen Timeline Affinities
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…

“Though this education had been carried on in a somewhat abnormal fashion, by conversation rather than by books, it was not, in my judgment, any the worse on that account.”

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

In time

William Philpot
Francis Hastings Doyle
1810 1889
They overlapped for 66 years (1823–1888). When William Philpot was born, Francis Hastings Doyle was about 13. William Philpot was about 65 when Francis Hastings Doyle died.
William Philpot in history Francis Hastings Doyle in history Years they were given

On the map

About 266 km separate Southwold, Suffolk, England from Nunappleton, Yorkshire. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

William Philpot

Francis Hastings Doyle

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.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

William Philpot only

birds philpot freedom music

Francis Hastings Doyle only

doyle death life soldier courage imperial rose sympathy diamonds gift love stoic

From the biographies

social

William Philpot: victorian poetry, napoleonic wars, chartist movement, queen victoria, local periodicals, religious conflict, poems of place, devotional sequence. Francis Hastings Doyle: victorian ideals, the private of the buffs, sir francis hastings doyle, barrister, oxford professor, balliol college, eton, the duke of monmouth.

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.

To the Birds
William Philpot
71%
Compare
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
To the Birds
William Philpot
71%
Compare
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
To the Birds
William Philpot
68%
Compare
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1823 Byron Joins the Greek War of Independence
1823 Publication of 'The Poems of Jeremiah Joseph Callanan'
1824 Lord Byron Arrives in Missolonghi to Lead the Greek Forces
1830 Indian Removal Act of 1830
1831 Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction in London
1831 HMS Beagle Begins Darwin's Survey Voyage
1831 Michael Faraday Discovers Electromagnetic Induction
1831 Publication of 'Canti'

William Philpot

1835 William Philpot's Early Education
1850 Marriage of William Philpot
1855 Publication of First Collection
1865 Friendship with Local Poets
1870 Recognition in Local Literary Circles
1875 Involvement in Literary Societies
1880 Publication of Major Work
1885 Final Years and Reflection on Poetry

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

Emotional landscapes

William Philpot: Longing, Sorrow, Despair. Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow.

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