A Poem

Yesterday, my best friend Nicole brought to my attention the subtitle of this blog, which has been there since I began it as a school assignment almost a year ago. You can read it (or reread it, for that matter), if you choose. Anyway, I chose that particular quote from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, because, well, I've always liked it. In the early days of my animation studies, I would frequently get it stuck in my head while pulling all nighters, trying to figure out 3D modeling. Yesterday, I also learned that it is an excerpt from, what I consider to be, a wonderful poem. Enjoy.

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 forever, 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.

-Arthur O'Shaughnessy