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.
