April Leadership Reflection

April is National Poetry Month in the United States (see http://www.poets.org/npm) – and spring is a great time of year to read and write poetry (especially after that long, hard winter that we’ve had here in the Midwest!). Poetry has played a major role in shaping human perceptions of leaders and leadership since the dawn of recorded history. Panegyrics of praise can inspire millions of people to follow a new leader, and stinging satires can topple a ruthless dictator. Popular poems, when set to music, can draw diverse communities of people together to break down barriers and work alongside each other for the common good of all. Moreover, poets have often become leaders of movements for positive change in the world – and sometimes, leaders have become poets in order to motivate their followers toward achieving a beneficial goal.

Here’s a poem to help us reflect on the poets who have helped to shape our lives and worldviews – a wise and witty composition from the Keltik Renaissance in 19^th-century Ireland. It was adopted as the official anthem of the James Scholar Media Team (JSMT) in February 2011, and I had the pleasure of reading it to our members and guests at our club’s fifth birthday celebration.

“Ode” (1874)

By Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy (1844-1881)

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the Earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And overthrew 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.

4. A breath of our inspiration
Is 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.

5. They had no vision amazing
Of 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.

6. And therefore today is thrilling
With a past day’s late fulfilling.
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of tomorrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

7. 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 be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

8. 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.

9. “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 dreamt not before;
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

        For another versified celebration of “poetry in motion,” be sure to read Hans Christian Andersen’s (1805-1875) classic fairy tale, “The Phoenix-Bird” (1850), archived @ http://hca.gilead.org.il/phoenix.html.