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

Laurence Binyon Laurence Binyon

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 79% Poems 85% Blended 82%
Swap sides Another related pair
Laurence Binyon

Laurence Binyon

10 August 1869 – 10 March 1943 (~74)
3 live poems · English

Laurence Binyon was born in Lancaster, England, on 10 August 1869, and died in Reading on 10 March 1943. During his lifetime he occupied an unusual and influential place in British cultural life: he was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, museum curator, critic, and lecturer. Yet public memory has narrowed him, often understandably, to the author of “For the Fallen,” the 1914 poem whose most famous stanza h…

“Beauty comes only from the relation of the features to each other and to the pervading character of the whole.”

Neighbourhood: Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Peace
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…

“The great desire of a good citizen should be to fill up, as far as possible, the gulfs that separate one set of Englishmen from another.”

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

In time

Laurence Binyon
Francis Hastings Doyle
1810 1943
They overlapped for 20 years (1869–1888). When Laurence Binyon was born, Francis Hastings Doyle was about 59. Laurence Binyon was about 19 when Francis Hastings Doyle died.
Laurence Binyon in history Francis Hastings Doyle in history Years they were given

On the map

About 103 km separate Lancaster, England from Nunappleton, Yorkshire. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

Laurence Binyon

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.

Shared

death life

Laurence Binyon only

world dead fallen grief soldiers memory house cedar landscape garden domestic flowers

Francis Hastings Doyle only

doyle soldier courage imperial rose sympathy diamonds gift love stoic duty suffering

From the biographies

britain

Laurence Binyon: lancaster, for the fallen, cicely margaret powell, the times, british museum, trinity college, painting in the far east, the flight of the dragon. 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.

For the Fallen
Laurence Binyon
81% death
Compare
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
O Summer sun
Laurence Binyon
73% life
Compare
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
For the Fallen
Laurence Binyon
72% death
Compare
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
O Summer sun
Laurence Binyon
71% life
Compare
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
The House That Was
Laurence Binyon
70%
Compare
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
For the Fallen
Laurence Binyon
69%
Compare
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1869 Completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad
1870 Hardy Meets Emma Lavinia Gifford in Cornwall
1870 Second Industrial Revolution Accelerates
1871 Publication of 'Middlemarch'
1871 Publication of 'Rimas'
1873 Maxwell publishes Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in Cambridge
1873 Rimbaud's 'A Season in Hell' Composition
1876 Gerard Manley Hopkins composes his major poems

Laurence Binyon

1887 Scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford
1893 Employment at the British Museum
1894 Publication of 'Lyric Poems'
1911 Publication of 'The Flight of the Dragon'
1914 Volunteering for hospital service during WWI
1914 Writing of 'For the Fallen'
1916 Publication of 'The Great War and the British Empire'
1943 Publication of 'The Collected Poems of Laurence Binyon'

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

Laurence Binyon: Wonder, Longing, Peace. Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow.

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