Uploaded December 2024 | Updated September 2026, 10 hours ago
"Ode" is a poem written by the English poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy and first published in 1873. It is the first poem in O'Shaughnessy's collection Music and Moonlight (1874).
We are the ones who make music, and the ones who dream dreams. We wander along remote shorelines and sit by lonely streams. We are people who renounce the world, people on whom the moon shines. But we also always seem to be the people who shake the world to its foundations.
We construct the world's great cities with our awe-inspiring, immortal songs. From magical stories, we create the glories of empires. A single artist with a dream can overthrow a monarch, and three artists with a new song can overthrow a whole kingdom.
Those of us who are long dead and buried built the ancient city of Nineveh with our laments, and the ancient city of Babel with our laughter. Then we destroyed those cities with prophecies of a new and better world, because every era is a dream that is either dying or being born.
A hint of our vision gives life to every new generation. Our astonishing, seemingly impossible dreams give soldiers, kings, and peasants alike a shared vision, until our dreams become reality and everyone works together to make them come true.
Normal people don't know that they're building this new world; they have no advance knowledge of the new place they're going. But the solitary artist's soul can perceive an eternal light, and the way he looks and the words he says light fires in other people's hearts.
Therefore, the present is charged with the energy of past prophecies, and today's people enact the beliefs that earlier generations didn't accept. And while the people of the present reject tomorrow's new ideas, they still live out the joyful or sorrowful dreams of artists who came before them.
But we, dreaming and singing, never stop and are not sad. We feel the glory of the future all around us, and our souls hear divine music. Oh, normal people! We must always, because of our dreams and songs, live separately from you.
For we live in the dawns of future days, and from our place in these infinite mornings, you hear us bravely shout that, in spite of your scorn for new ideas, God's future is coming closer anyway, and it's already clear that you, too, will die, as the past must.
We shout grand greetings to the visitors from the bright, unexplored shores of the future, and ask them to bring us their light and their summers, and to renew the world once again. They will teach us new songs, and new dreams, in spite of a dreamer who sleeps, and a singer who no longer sings.
"Ode" is a poem written by the English poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy and first published in 1873. It is the first poem in O'Shaughnessy's collection Music and Moonlight (1874).
We are the ones who make music, and the ones who dream dreams. We wander along remote shorelines and sit by lonely streams. We are people who renounce the world, people on whom the moon shines. But we also always seem to be the people who shake the world to its foundations.
We construct the world's great cities with our awe-inspiring, immortal songs. From magical stories, we create the glories of empires. A single artist with a dream can overthrow a monarch, and three artists with a new song can overthrow a whole kingdom.
Those of us who are long dead and buried built the ancient city of Nineveh with our laments, and the ancient city of Babel with our laughter. Then we destroyed those cities with prophecies of a new and better world, because every era is a dream that is either dying or being born.
A hint of our vision gives life to every new generation. Our astonishing, seemingly impossible dreams give soldiers, kings, and peasants alike a shared vision, until our dreams become reality and everyone works together to make them come true.
Normal people don't know that they're building this new world; they have no advance knowledge of the new place they're going. But the solitary artist's soul can perceive an eternal light, and the way he looks and the words he says light fires in other people's hearts.
Therefore, the present is charged with the energy of past prophecies, and today's people enact the beliefs that earlier generations didn't accept. And while the people of the present reject tomorrow's new ideas, they still live out the joyful or sorrowful dreams of artists who came before them.
But we, dreaming and singing, never stop and are not sad. We feel the glory of the future all around us, and our souls hear divine music. Oh, normal people! We must always, because of our dreams and songs, live separately from you.
For we live in the dawns of future days, and from our place in these infinite mornings, you hear us bravely shout that, in spite of your scorn for new ideas, God's future is coming closer anyway, and it's already clear that you, too, will die, as the past must.
We shout grand greetings to the visitors from the bright, unexplored shores of the future, and ask them to bring us their light and their summers, and to renew the world once again. They will teach us new songs, and new dreams, in spite of a dreamer who sleeps, and a singer who no longer sings.
