Poetry Sunday: Ode

In my favorite movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka says one of my favorite phrases ever (The first two lines of the poem), and he got it from this poem, Ode by Arthur O' Shaugnessy. Enjoy!

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.