Ode (We Are the Music Makers) by Arthur O'Shaughnessy
Quick answer: Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, the We Are the Music Makers poem, analysed: where movers and shakers comes from, how the verse works, and why artists quote it.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy worked as a herpetologist at the British Museum, published a handful of volumes, died at thirty-six, and would be almost forgotten if he had not written eight lines that refuse to die. His Ode, from the 1874 collection Music and Moonlight, begins with music makers and dreamers of dreams and ends by declaring that these apparently useless people are "the movers and shakers" of the world forever. He coined that phrase; the world kept it.
The full ode runs nine stanzas, though anthologies usually print the first three, and it makes the boldest claim available to art: that empires, cities and every age's great deeds begin as somebody's dream, usually a dream dreamed by someone the practical world ignores.
The poem
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.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 'Ode', from Music and Moonlight (1874)
What the poem says
The opening stanza is a self-portrait of the artist tribe: music makers, dreamers of dreams, wanderers by lone sea-breakers, sitters by desolate streams. The world calls them losers and forsakers, pale figures under a pale moon, and the stanza grants every insult before reversing the verdict in its final two lines: yet these are the movers and shakers of the world for ever.
The following stanzas supply the mechanism. With wonderful deathless ditties the dreamers build up the world's great cities; one man with a dream, at pleasure, can go forth and conquer a crown, and three with a new song's measure can trample an empire down. The ode sweeps through Nineveh and Babel, built of sighs and mirth, and declares that each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth. In the later, less quoted stanzas the poem hands the future over: the dreamers of today teach the next age its dream, then die out as it takes over.
How it works
The famous first stanza is a small machine of paired opposites. Its rhymes run alternately (makers, breakers, forsakers, shakers), and the '-akers' chain is the argument in sound: the same syllable that names the artists as world-forsakers renames them movers and shakers. The reversal is prepared inside the rhyme scheme before it happens in the sense.
The metre is a rocking, waltz-like triple rhythm, closer to song than speech, which suits an ode about music's power and explains why composers pounced on it; Elgar set the poem in 1912 as The Music Makers. Note also the sustained first person plural. There is no 'I' anywhere: the ode speaks as a guild, and its confidence is collective. The pronoun is doing as much persuading as the imagery.
Why it lasts
Frankly, it lasts by its first stanza, one of the most successful single stanzas of the Victorian era. It gave English two permanent phrases, movers and shakers and dreamers of dreams, and it distilled the Romantic doctrine of the artist as unacknowledged legislator into a form you can recite at a school concert. Willy Wonka quotes it; graduation speakers lean on it; musicians from Elgar onward keep setting it.
There is also a melancholy under the confidence that repays adult rereading: the dreamers build ages they do not live to see, and the ode's later stanzas accept obsolescence as the price of prophecy. It is a victory song that knows its singers die out.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the pre-loaded rhyme reversal. If your poem turns an insult into a title, let the insult and the title share a rhyme sound, so the reversal feels inevitable rather than asserted. Sound can carry logic.
Steal the guild voice. Writing as 'we' on behalf of a tribe, nurses, immigrants, insomniacs, night-shift bakers, produces instant scale and dignity. Grant the world's accusations first, then reverse them in the last two lines of the stanza.
What poets can take from this
- Speak as 'we' for a whole tribe when you want scale without boasting.
- Concede every insult against your subject before reversing the verdict.
- Let key opposed words share a rhyme sound so the turn feels fated.
- Use a triple, songlike rhythm for odes meant to be spoken aloud.
- Hide one melancholy admission inside a triumphant poem; it buys believability.
Try it yourself
Write an ode that begins 'We are the...' on behalf of a group the world underestimates. Spend six lines agreeing with the world's dismissals, then reverse everything in the final two lines using a rhyme you planted earlier.
Questions
Where does the phrase 'movers and shakers' come from?
It was coined in this poem. O'Shaughnessy's 1874 Ode declares that artists, the world-losers and world-forsakers, are in fact 'the movers and shakers of the world for ever'. The phrase entered everyday English and outlived its author's fame.
What is the theme of We Are the Music Makers?
The ode claims that artists and dreamers are the true force behind history: cities, empires and each new age begin as someone's song or dream. It also accepts, more quietly, that each generation of dreamers is replaced by the next.
Who set the Ode to music?
Most famously Edward Elgar, whose 1912 choral work The Music Makers sets the poem for contralto, chorus and orchestra. The ode's waltzing triple rhythm has attracted many other composers and speechmakers since.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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