The Poet: Arthur O’Shaughnessy, "Music and Moonlight"

"Music and Moonlight"

"We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone seabreakers,

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…

We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth,

Built Ninevah 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."

- Arthur O’Shaughnessy