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

Owen Seaman Owen Seaman

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 73% Poems 82% Blended 77%
Swap sides Another related pair
Owen Seaman

Owen Seaman

18 September 1861 – 2 February 1936 (~75)
2 live poems · English

Owen Seaman, born on 18 September 1861 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, and dead on 2 February 1936, occupied an unusually influential place in British literary culture for a man whose name is now less familiar than the names of many writers he parodied, edited, or helped to popularize. Poet, humorist, classicist, journalist, critic, lecturer, and long-serving editor of Punch, he was one of the most conspicuous representat…

“I should indeed be ungrateful if after an entertainment so smoothly and dexterously administered I were to be captious about origins or other matters of pedantry.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Anger
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…

“Definitions of poetry indeed are always more or less unintelligible.”

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

In time

Owen Seaman
Francis Hastings Doyle
1810 1936
They overlapped for 28 years (1861–1888). When Owen Seaman was born, Francis Hastings Doyle was about 51. Owen Seaman was about 27 when Francis Hastings Doyle died.
Owen Seaman in history Francis Hastings Doyle in history Years they were given

On the map

About 173 km separate Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England from Nunappleton, Yorkshire. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

Owen Seaman

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

soldier

Owen Seaman only

light songs heart world danger trench culture patriot false military patriotic recruit

Francis Hastings Doyle only

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

From the biographies

social

Owen Seaman: shrewsbury, punch, edwardian wit, clare college, rossall school, the battle of the bays, in cap and bells, borrowed plumes. 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 a False Patriot
Owen Seaman
81% soldier
Compare
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
Thomas of the Light Heart
Owen Seaman
80% soldier
Compare
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
Thomas of the Light Heart
Owen Seaman
71% light
Compare
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
To a False Patriot
Owen Seaman
68%
Compare
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
Thomas of the Light Heart
Owen Seaman
66%
Compare
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
To a False Patriot
Owen Seaman
64%
Compare
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1861 Battle of Fort Sumter
1861 James Clerk Maxwell Publishes Equations on Electromagnetism
1861 Louis Pasteur Confirms Germ Theory
1861 Publication of 'Barbara Frietchie' Era Civil War
1862 The Invention of Pasteurization by Louis Pasteur
1863 Battle of Gettysburg
1863 Emancipation Proclamation
1863 Gettysburg Address

Owen Seaman

1874 Education at Shrewsbury School
1883 First teaching position at Rossall School
1883 Graduation from Clare College, Cambridge
1887 First published poem in Punch
1906 Appointment as editor of Punch
1909 Publication of 'The New Humour'
1922 Publication of 'The Poetry of Owen Seaman'
1936 Death of Owen Seaman

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

Owen Seaman: Irony, Sorrow, Anger. Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow.

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