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

Francis Hastings Doyle Francis Hastings Doyle

Poet B

Matthew Arnold Matthew Arnold
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 75% Poems 87% Blended 80%
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
Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888 (~66)
12 live poems · English

Matthew Arnold was born on 24 December 1822 at Laleham, Middlesex, a village beside the Thames, and died suddenly on 15 April 1888 at Liverpool. He became one of the defining English voices of the Victorian age: a poet of haunting melancholy, a critic who sought standards of excellence amid cultural confusion, an educational civil servant with an unusually broad public vision, and a controversial commentator on relig…

“Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.”

Neighbourhood: Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
Listen Timeline Affinities

In time

Francis Hastings Doyle
Matthew Arnold
1810 1888
They overlapped for 67 years (1822–1888). When Matthew Arnold was born, Francis Hastings Doyle was about 12.
Francis Hastings Doyle in history Matthew Arnold in history Years they were given

On the map

About 290 km separate Nunappleton, Yorkshire from Laleham, Middlesex, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.

Francis Hastings Doyle

Matthew Arnold

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

Matthew Arnold only

self world nature voice stars faith religious youth spiritual dependence sound dover

From the biographies

oxford 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. Matthew Arnold: laleham, rugby school, thomas arnold, frances lucy wightman, the forsaken merman, sohrab and rustum, the scholar-gipsy, empedocles on etna.

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 Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
82% life
Compare
Morality
Matthew Arnold
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
79%
Compare
Self-Dependence
Matthew Arnold
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
78%
Compare
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
78%
Compare
The Last Word
Matthew Arnold
The Stoic
Francis Hastings Doyle
78% life, light
Compare
Despondency
Matthew Arnold
The Private of the Buffs
Francis Hastings Doyle
77%
Compare
The Last Word
Matthew Arnold

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

1823 Byron Joins the Greek War of Independence
1823 Publication of 'The Poems of Jeremiah Joseph Callanan'
1824 Lord Byron Arrives in Missolonghi to Lead the Greek Forces
1830 Indian Removal Act of 1830
1831 Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction in London
1831 HMS Beagle Begins Darwin's Survey Voyage
1831 Michael Faraday Discovers Electromagnetic Induction
1831 Publication of 'Canti'

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

Matthew Arnold

1842 Death of Father, Dr. Thomas Arnold
1849 Publication of 'The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems'
1851 Appointment as Inspector of Schools
1851 Marriage to Frances Lucy Wightman
1852 Publication of 'Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems'
1853 Publication of 'Poems: A New Edition'
1865 Publication of 'Essays in Criticism'
1869 Publication of 'Culture and Anarchy'

Emotional landscapes

Francis Hastings Doyle: Spirituality, Wonder, Sorrow. Matthew Arnold: Longing, Sorrow, Despair.

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