Poem of the Day: ‘Ode’

Like father, like son goes the adage, invoked in English since at least the fourteenth century — so long ago that we no longer remember who said it first. If in fact a genetic connection existed between the British novelist Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) and the poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy (1844–1881), reputedly one of Bulwer-Lytton’s many illegitimate children, that connection seems to have expressed itself in a gift for the ready-to-wear cliché. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren might never know that a particular person, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, once sat down and wrote phrases like “the great unwashed” or “the almighty dollar” or “It was a dark and stormy night.” Those origins might well be drowned (and would we miss them?) in the great blank sea of cultural amnesia. Even now, we toss off the same phrases without stopping to attribute them to any source. They’re simply the first words to surface in the mind, so familiar to us that we might have come up with them ourselves.Consider today’s Poem of the Day, then, as a blow against that forgetfulness, a footnote to carry in your memory. The next time someone you love refers to “movers and shakers,” you can say, “Ah, quoting Arthur O’Shaughnessy, are we?” In short, you can make yourself insufferable. Or if you’d rather not make yourself insufferable, you can simply read the poem. Although T.S. Eliot categorized O’Shaughnessy as a minor poet, he was capable of technical marvels. In “Ode,” the tight trimeter lines, with their constrained ababab rhyme scheme, urge the reader forward from the dead past into a vast future of unbounded possibility, on some “dazzling unknown shore.” Written before O’Shaughnessy’s thirtieth birthday, “Ode” is a young man’s poem. It wears, too, the patina of pathos: not only a young man’s poem, but the poem of a man who died young. The dreamers and movers and shakers may be tired to us now, over-familiar. Still, it’s worth remembering that a particular man set down those phrases and did not see them grow old.Odeby Arthur O’ShaughnessyWe 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 dittiesWe 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 a kingdom down.We, in the ages lying, In the buried past of the earth,Built Nineveh 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.A breath of our inspirationIs the life of each generation; A wondrous thing of our dreaming Unearthly, impossible seeming —The soldier, the king, and the peasant Are working together in one,Till our dream shall become their present, And their work in the world be done.They had no vision amazingOf the goodly house they are raising; They had no divine foreshowing Of the land to which they are going:But on one man’s soul it hath broken, A light that doth not depart;And his look, or a word he hath spoken, Wrought flame in another man’s heart.And therefore to-day is thrillingWith a past day’s late fulfilling; And the multitudes are enlisted In the faith that their fathers resisted,And, scorning the dream of to-morrow, Are bringing to pass, as they may,In the world, for its joy or its sorrow, The dream that was scorned yesterday.But we, with our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we!The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,Our souls with high music ringing: O men! it must ever beThat we dwell, in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye.For we are afar with the dawning And the suns that are not yet high,And out of the infinite morning Intrepid you hear us cry —How, spite of your human scorning, Once more God’s future draws nigh,And already goes forth the warning That ye of the past must die.Great hail! we cry to the comers From the dazzling unknown shore;Bring us hither your sun and your summers; And renew our world as of yore;You shall teach us your song’s new numbers, And things that we dreamed not before:Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers, And a singer who sings no more.___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Ode’

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