Ode
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 for ever, 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 an empire down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with 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.
---Arthur O'Shaughnessy. 1844–1881
try to imagine which agony or elation o'shaughnessy was tempering with these words: for me it stays gray. though human agonies and elations are common and stock, and few--they are yet so unforgivably, minutely, specific that often we dream in scarlet of being understood.
is this a summons to remember: the out-the-windowation of a dream will slap you to your knees, and you will become again fully vertical? and: standing again says more than the dream? and: of the dreams that come true, they aren't always lovely, or permanent. so: dream new.
of course, my interpretation is mine and only for today: tomorrow this will have died, and something else come to be.
