Analysis Of We Are The Music Makers ISC Class 11, 12 English Literature
English is a difficult subject for many people to learn. Some students may become frustrated and give up, but here’s an Analysis Of We Are The Music Makers ISC Class 11, 12 English Literature to help you maintain your momentum! This Analysis Of We Are The Music Makers will provide all necessary information needed in order to study ISC Class 11, 12 English successfully at home or school; it includes detailed grammar rules with examples that were used during today’s class discussion on the ISC English literature exam.
The Analysis Of We Are The Music Makers in English Chapter 1, ISC English literature class 11, 12 makes it easier to understand the story. Understanding every detail of a story is important for scoring higher on an exam and expert writers have made sure that you know how everything flows together by summarizing perfectly!
About the Poet
Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy was a British poet of Irish descent who was born in London on March 14, 1844. He spent the outer portion of his minimal life of 36 years, from the age of seventeen, in the service of the library as a transcribed in the Natural History Department of the British Museum. A couple of years later, at the age of nineteen, he became a herpetologist( someone who specializes in the concise study of amphibians and reptiles).
However, his love for literature supplanted everything. His inner life is expressed in four volumes of verse- the ‘Epic of Women’(1870), ‘Lays of France’(1872), ‘Music and moonlight(1874) and ‘Songs of a Worker’ (published posthumously in 1881).
Arthur was associated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and especially Charles Swinburne of Pre-Raphaelites. In a small comic limerick, which was posthumously published by Michael Rossetti, D. G Rossetti describes his friend O’Shaughnessy as:
“There’s the Irishman
Arthur O’Shaughnessy
On the chessboard of
poets as pawn is here:
Though bishop Or king
Would be rather the
thing.”
According to anthologist Francis Turner Palgrave, Arthur had “a haunting music all his own “ “We are the Music Makers” got published in 1873 under the famous title ‘Ode’. This poem portrays a universal appeal towards the contribution of the artists, musicians, writers, and others to the society. Finally, Edward Elgar quotes ‘ The mainspring of O’Shaughnessy’s Ode is the sense of progress, of never-ceasing change; it is the duty of the artist to see that this inevitable change is progress.”
About the Poem
The Ode, famously known by its very first line “
We are the Music Makers” is the first poem in the collection of O’Shaughnessy’s ‘Music and Moonlight’(1874). The line has been reflected in many different media:
a) Spoken by Willy Wonka in ‘Charlie and The Chocolate Factory’.
b) Used in the Aphex Twin song, “We are the Music Makers” from the album Selected Ambient Works. The motif of O’Shaughnessy’s poem is the notion that the poets- the music makers and dreamers-are the true makers of history and of human civilization. Their dreams and their visions are the foreshadowings of what the rest of mankind arepredestined to work out in tireless conflict: to-day is the realisation of a dream of generations of past; to-morrow will bring forth the dream of today. This gives an indication of “The Good Morrow” of John Donne.
Structure of 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.
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 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 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.
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.
The poem ‘We Are the Music Makers’ is an Ode. An ode is a serious and dignified composition. It is exalted in subject-matter and elevated in tone and style. The theme and its treatment cannot be trivial or undignified. The poem follows a rhyme scheme that adds to the musical note of the poem. According to anthologist Francis Turner Palgrave, O’Shaughnessy had “a haunting music all his own”. The poem was composed to chords in 1912 by Edward Elgar in his famous work entitled The Music Makers. It follows the rhyme scheme ABABABAB in the first stanza, followed by AABBCDCD in the second and lastly ABABABAB in the final stanza. The various rhyming words in the poem such as makers, breakers, movers, shakers, streams, ditties et al.add a rhythmic tone in the poem. The changing rhythm conveys the change in the tone of the poetic voice.
Poetic persona
Here, in the poem, the speaker should not be identified with the poet. Although it is obvious that the narrative of the poem is in the first person ‘we’- the collective voice of the artists which gives the poem its universal appeal. Thus, the speaker represents all the strata of creative personas- poets, musicians, painters, artists, etc. who are the harbinger of creative rebellion in the otherwise sombre society.
The theme of the poem
The leading theme of the poem is certainly an appreciation of art and bringing out its transformative power through the form of poetry. The poem discusses two things; the importance of arts and the pivotal role that artists play in this world to bring about a blissful change. Their timeless and immortal workpieces not only give positive vibes into society but also help people come out of the unimaginative, dull and monotonous existence. Thus, the poet puts them in the highest pedestal and calls them almost immortal beings. Though art does not cause any physical change, it acts as a goading cause for change. The artists don’t practically get involved in the prevailing social cacophony, their art makes them ‘movers’ and ‘shakers’. They plunge the society on the way of progress and growth in the realm of ideas by shaking it from its stagnation and slumber. The artists remain outside of the predestined societal norms and bring about desirable changes in the world. Shakespeare’s Theseus recognizes the power of the poet’s pen that “gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name”. O’Shaughnessy makes it clear in his poem that fantasies of the artist are not mere fantasies. Their fantasies, dreams, myths, and legends inspire civilizations. They are to be seen as revolutionaries:
Yet we are the
movers and shakers
Of the World forever,
it seems
Their world of imagination is conceived to be ‘Infinite and Eternal’ by William Blake, Percy.
Shelley, John Keats, in fact, all the Romantic poets in one way or the other.
In the third stanza, the poet has attributed saintly status to art by referring to biblical cities of Babel and Nineveh which designates them as both creators and destroyers of this human world through their angelic art form. Moreover, he has rejected the concept of Aestheticism, which glorifies the idea that an artist’s only the relationship is to his art itself, referring to the popular 19th-century movement of art for art’s sake and that created the artists as the harbinger of creative rebellions.
Questions And Answers
What is the main theme of the poem we are the music makers?
‘We are the Music Makers’ underlines the idea that art is not for art’s sake, rather it is for life’s sake. Art is a powerful vehicle for social change. It has great transformative power.
Why is We are the music makers an ode?
We Are The Music Makers is an ode to the ones who dream and create. It is a tribute to artists, poets, writers and musicians who shape the world through their art. … It doesn’t limit itself to a particular form of art but includes all the creative and artistic endeavors pursued by humans