Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Arthur O'Shaughnessy, ca.1875.

Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (born March 14, 1844 in London , † January 30, 1881 ibid) was an English poet and herpetologist .

Life

At 17 he became a clerk in the library of the British Museum and at 19 he became a herpetologist in the zoological department of the museum. He described six new reptile species between 1874 and 1881. Albert Günther named a chameleon after him ( Calumma oshaughnessyi ) and a total of four reptile species were named after him (by Günther and George Albert Boulenger ).

In his anthology Epic of Women , O'Shaughnessy published his poems for the first time in 1870. The next volume "Lays of France" followed in 1872, also with moderate success. A year later he married Eleanor Marston, the daughter of the author John Westland Marston and sister of the poet Philip Bourke Marston . They have two children who both die in childhood. His last poems appeared in 1874 with Music and Moonlight . Due to the lack of success of his works, he decides against the publication of further poems. A year later, the book Toy-land appears , a children's book that he wrote with his wife. In 1879, two years before his death, his wife dies. His last volume of poetry, Song of a Worker, appeared shortly after his death in 1881.

Unrecognized in his lifetime, O'Shaughnessy would only gain popularity in the early 21st century. One of his best known and most frequently quoted poems is the ode from his book Music and Moonlight (1874):

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.

The poem was musically interpreted by Edward Elgar in his Opus 69 and can be found among others. a. also in the abbreviated form referred to above plus parts of a later stanza in modern electronic music in the title "Reflector" by the band "Auto Aggression".

It also appears in the 1971 Roald Dahl film adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory :

Willy Wonka: “The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozzberries taste like snozzberries. "

Veruca Salt: “Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry? "

Willy Wonka: "We are the music makers ... and we are the dreamers of dreams."

In the film The Club of Dead Poets and the resulting novel by Nancy H. Kleinbaum , the student Cameron quotes the first three stanzas of the poem in chapter 7 at a meeting of the club.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Beolens, Watkins, Grayson, The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles, Johns Hopkins University Press 2011
2. ^ Wikisource