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Home  »  library  »  Song  »  Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy (1844–1881)

C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy (1844–1881)

We Are the Music-Makers

WE are the music-makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;—

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties

We build up the world’s great cities,

And out of a fabulous story

We fashion an empire’s glory:

One man with a dream, at pleasure,

Shall go forth and conquer a crown;

And three with a new song’s measure

Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth,

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

And Babel itself in our mirth;

And o’erthrew them with prophesying

To the Old of the New World’s worth:

For each age is a dream that is dying,

Or one that is coming to birth.