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

W. H. Davies W. H. Davies
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 89% Blended 81%
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
W. H. Davies

W. H. Davies

3 July 1871 – 26 September 1940 (~69)
23 live poems · English

William Henry Davies, known throughout his writing life as W. H. Davies, was born on 3 July 1871 at 16 Portland Street in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, and died on 26 September 1940 in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. He remains one of the most unusual figures in twentieth-century British literature: a poet of birds, rain, flowers, beggars, exhausted workers, roadside freedom, and the precarious dignity of people whom r…

“If during these five years I had had the daily companionship of good books, instead of all this restless wandering, my mind might be capable of some little achievement of its own.”

Neighbourhood: Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Welsh Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Francis Hastings Doyle
W. H. Davies
1810 1940
They overlapped for 18 years (1871–1888). When W. H. Davies was born, Francis Hastings Doyle was about 61. W. H. Davies was about 17 when Francis Hastings Doyle died.
Francis Hastings Doyle in history W. H. Davies in history Years they were given

On the map

About 291 km separate Nunappleton, Yorkshire from Newport, Wales. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

Francis Hastings Doyle

W. H. Davies

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

life love

Francis Hastings Doyle only

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

W. H. Davies only

world beauty nature social beloved birds power spring clouds self mother tree

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. W. H. Davies: newport, monmouthshire, the soul destroyer, leisure, george bernard shaw, edward thomas, super-tramp, the autobiography of a super-tramp.

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.

Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
83% life
Compare
Strong Moments
W. H. Davies
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
78% love
Compare
Love's Inspiration
W. H. Davies
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
78%
Compare
Joy Supreme
W. H. Davies
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
76% life
Compare
Strong Moments
W. H. Davies
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
76% life
Compare
Days Too Short
W. H. Davies
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
76% love
Compare
An Early Love
W. H. Davies

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

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 1876-78 Super El Niño Causes Worldwide Famines
1876 Gerard Manley Hopkins composes his major poems
1879 Edison Demonstrates the Carbon-Filament Incandescent Lamp
1882 Robert Koch Discovers the Tuberculosis Bacillus

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

W. H. Davies

1893 Davies's Departure for America
1899 Injury and Loss of Foot
1905 Publication of 'The Soul's Destroyer'
1905 Return to England and Early Publications
1908 Publication of 'The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp'
1916 Publication of 'Nature Poems'
1930 Publication of 'Collected Poems'
1934 Publication of 'Collected Poems'

Emotional landscapes

Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow. W. H. Davies: Tenderness, Wonder, Longing.

Skip to main content