English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.
Arthur William Edgar OShaughnessy
733. Ode
W
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.
And out of a fabulous story
We build up the world’s great cities,
We fashion an empire’s glory:
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.
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.