Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy.

1844-1881

832   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.

833   Song

I MADE another garden, yea,
  For my new Love:
I left the dead rose where it lay
  And set the new above.
Why did my Summer not begin?
  Why did my heart not haste?
My old Love came and walk’d therein,
  And laid the garden waste.

She enter’d with her weary smile,
  Just as of old;
She look’d around a little while
  And shiver’d with the cold:
Her passing touch was death to all,
  Her passing look a blight;
She made the white rose- petals fall,
  And turn’d the red rose white.

Her pale robe clinging to the grass
  Seem’d like a snake
That bit the grass and grounds, alas!
  And a sad trail did make.
She went up slowly to the gate,
  And then, just as of yore,
She turn’d back at the last to wait
  And say farewell once more.