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

Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Lord Tennyson
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 88% Blended 83%
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…

“Like champagne, the brightest iridescences of wit depend upon the surrounding atmosphere, and cease to shine when they cease to reflect its immediate influence.”

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

Alfred Lord Tennyson

6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892 (~83)
27 live poems · English

Alfred Tennyson, later Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 6 August 1809 at Somersby rectory in Lincolnshire, England, and died on 6 October 1892 at Lurgashall in Sussex. During his long life he became the defining poetic voice of the Victorian age: at once a public laureate who wrote for national occasions and a private, searching poet whose work returned obsessively to bereavement, desire, religious uncertainty, mem…

“Poetry is like shot silk with many gleams and varying shades of meaning.”

Neighbourhood: Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Francis Hastings Doyle
Alfred Lord Tennyson
1809 1892
They overlapped for 79 years (1810–1888). When Francis Hastings Doyle was born, Alfred Lord Tennyson was about 1. Alfred Lord Tennyson was about 79 when Francis Hastings Doyle died.
Francis Hastings Doyle in history Alfred Lord Tennyson in history Years they were given

On the map

About 116 km separate Nunappleton, Yorkshire from Somersby, Lincolnshire, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

Francis Hastings Doyle

Alfred Lord Tennyson

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

Francis Hastings Doyle only

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

Alfred Lord Tennyson only

world nature desire beauty light fantasy absence sound power voice grief dead

From the biographies

social

Francis Hastings Doyle: victorian ideals, the private of the buffs, sir francis hastings doyle, barrister, oxford professor, balliol college, eton, the duke of monmouth. Alfred Lord Tennyson: somersby, lincolnshire, victorian age, arthur henry hallam, in memoriam, the lady of shalott, the lotos-eaters, ulysses.

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
84% courage, death
Compare
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
76% death, life
Compare
The Sailor Boy
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
76% death
Compare
The Sailor Boy
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
75% death, life
Compare
Crossing the Bar
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
75% death, life, light
Compare
Love and Death
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
75% life, light
Compare
The Deserted House
Alfred Lord Tennyson

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

Alfred Lord Tennyson

1827 Tennyson Enters Trinity College
1829 Tennyson Wins Chancellor's Gold Medal
1833 Death of Arthur Hallam
1850 Marriage to Emily Sellwood
1850 Publication of 'In Memoriam A.H.H.'
1859 Publication of 'Idylls of the King'
1892 Tennyson's Final Poems Published
1892 Tennyson's Later Life and Death

Emotional landscapes

Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow. Alfred Lord Tennyson: Wonder, Longing, Sorrow.

Skip to main content