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.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this 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

Thomas Babington Macaulay Thomas Babington Macaulay

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 72% Poems 81% Blended 76%
Swap sides Another related pair
Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay

25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859 (~59)
2 live poems · English

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born on 25 October 1800 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire and died on 28 December 1859 at Kensington, London. He was at once a poet, essayist, parliamentarian, colonial administrator, historian, reviewer, and one of the most commanding prose stylists in nineteenth-century English. To modern readers his name often summons the grand certainty of Victorian “Whig history,” the tendency to…

“Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.”

Neighbourhood: Folk & Ballad Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
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

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Francis Hastings Doyle
1800 1888
They overlapped for 50 years (1810–1859). When Francis Hastings Doyle was born, Thomas Babington Macaulay was about 10. Francis Hastings Doyle was about 49 when Thomas Babington Macaulay died.
Thomas Babington Macaulay in history Francis Hastings Doyle in history Years they were given

On the map

About 148 km separate Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, England from Nunappleton, Yorkshire. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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.

No overlapping top terms in the poem critiques — any kinship may sit in mood rather than vocabulary.

Thomas Babington Macaulay only

history jacobite exile lost memory buccaneer world maritime ship freedom violence

Francis Hastings Doyle only

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

From the biographies

Thomas Babington Macaulay: rothley temple, leicestershire, edinburgh review, lays of ancient rome, whig history, trinity college, chancellor’s gold medal, john milton. 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.

A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
81%
Compare
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
73%
Compare
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
71%
Compare
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
A Jacobite's Epitaph
Thomas Babington Macaulay
68%
Compare
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
66%
Compare
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
The Last Buccaneer
Thomas Babington Macaulay
53%
Compare
Sympathy
Francis Hastings Doyle

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay

1825 Publication of 'Milton' in the Edinburgh Review
1830 Elected to Parliament as a Whig
1830 Marriage to Lady Trevelyan
1832 Maiden Speech on the Reform Bill
1834 Appointment to the Supreme Council of India
1838 Return to England from India
1843 Publication of 'Essays'
1852 Appointment as a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow.

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