For some reason, every site & almost every published anthology
only has the first three stanzas. I encountered hints of the rest in
quotes by Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society; found
it in one anthology back in 1980; and have never seen it since.
So in my mission to make it more available, here it is…
ODE
Arthur O’Shaughnessy
(1844-1881)
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,
shall 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.
A breath of our inspiration
is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming,
Unearthly, impossible seeming-
The soldier, the king and the peasant
are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present
and their work in this world shall be done.
They had no vision amazing
of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
of the land to which they are going,
But on one man’s soul it hath broken
a light that doth not depart
And his look or a word he hath spoken
wrought flame in another man’s heart.
And therefore to-day is thrilling
with a past day’s late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
in the faith that their fathers resisted
And, scorning the dreams of tomorrow,
and bringing to pass, as they may,
To the world for its joy or its sorrow
the dream that was scorned yesterday.
But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing,
O man, it must ever be
That we dwell,in our dreaming and singing,
a little apart from ye.
For we are afar with the dawning
and the suns that are not yet high,
And our of the infinite morning,
Intrepid you hear us cry-
How, spite of your human scorning,
once more God’s future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
that ye of the past must die.
Great hail! we cry to the comers
from the dazzling unknown shore;
Give us hither your suns and your summers
and renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your songs new numbers,
and things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers
and a singer who sings no more.