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

Jessie Pope Jessie Pope

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.

Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 71% Poems 74% Blended 73%
Swap sides Another related pair
Jessie Pope

Jessie Pope

18 March 1868 – 14 December 1941 (~73)
2 live poems · English

Jessie Pope was born on 18 March 1868 in Leicester, England, and died on 14 December 1941, during the second year of another world war. She is remembered chiefly, and controversially, as one of the most conspicuous popular poets of British patriotic verse during the First World War. Yet to reduce her entirely to the recruitment poems that later generations have found disturbing is to overlook the long, energetic, and…

Neighbourhood: Light Verse Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Fear, Irony, Joy
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…

“Books of this kind have little claim to be valued as literature in any high sense of the word; their principal object, indeed, is to help on, more or less, future historical research.”

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

In time

Jessie Pope
Francis Hastings Doyle
1810 1941
They overlapped for 21 years (1868–1888). When Jessie Pope was born, Francis Hastings Doyle was about 58. Jessie Pope was about 20 when Francis Hastings Doyle died.

On the map

About 148 km separate Leicester, England from Nunappleton, Yorkshire. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

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

Jessie Pope only

Francis Hastings Doyle only

From the biographies

social

Jessie Pope: leicester, first world war, who's for the game?, the call, joseph pope, paper pellets, airy nothings, punch. 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.

The Call
Jessie Pope
75%
Compare
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
The Zeppelin Armada
Jessie Pope
73%
Compare
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
The Call
Jessie Pope
64% duty
Compare
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
The Zeppelin Armada
Jessie Pope
62%
Compare
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
The Call
Jessie Pope
58%
Compare
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
The Zeppelin Armada
Jessie Pope
53%
Compare
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Jessie Pope: Fear, Irony, Joy. Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow.

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