If you don’t have a clue what a herpetologist does, I will give you one; Gussie Fink-Nottle. That’s right, he studies reptiles and amphibians. Today’s subject (not Ken Livingston) was a herpetologist.
Our man is Arthur O’Shaughnessy. He described six new species of reptiles and, after his death in 1881, had four new species of lizards named after him; oshaughnessyi. Interesting that he sports a walrus moustache. Quite an honour and quite an achievement – the lizards, not the soup-strainer – but we are concerned with his poetry, specifically Ode, published in Music and Moonlight in 1874. It is beautiful, enigmatic and thought-provoking. I don’t think it is necessary to know what a poem means any more than you need to understand the words when an opera is sung in a foreign language. In both instances the words can be moving and create a mood. Incidentally, here A O’S coins a neologism, “movers and shakers”.
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.
Back to Gussie F-N and a short natural history lesson.