Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881). Photo by Elliot & Fry, London. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (14 March 1844 - 30 January 1881) was an English poet of Irish descent.

Life

Overview

O'Shaughnessy, born in London, entered the library of the British Museum, afterwards being transferred to the natural history department, where he became an authority on fishes and reptiles. He published various books of poetry, including Epic of Women (1870), Lays of France (1872), and Music and Moonlight (1874). Jointly with his wife he wrote Toyland, a book for children. He was associated with D.G. Rossetti and the other pre-Raphaelites. There is a certain remoteness in his poetry which will probably always prevent its being widely popular. He has a wonderful mastery of meter, and a "haunting music" all his own.

Youth

O'Shaughnessy was born in London on 14 March 1814. He was educated privately.

Career

In June 1861 he was appointed a junior assistant in the library of the British Museum, and in August 1863 was promoted to an assistantship in the zoological department. This transfer gave great offence to naturalists, and was condemned by a resolution passed at a meeting of the Zoological Society.

O'Shaughnessy's acquaintance with natural history must indeed have been exceedingly limited at the time; but, by devoting himself with perseverance to the single branch of herpetology, he came to be so good an authority upon this department of zoology as to be entrusted with the preparation of the portion of the annual zoological record devoted to it, and his death was deplored as a loss to science by Dr. Gunther, the head of the museum department to which O'Shaughnessy belonged.

His attention, nevertheless, had been even more decidedly given to poetry and general literature. In 1870, without having afforded much preliminary evidence of his gifts, he astonished the readers of poetry by his Epic of Women, and other poems, illustrated with designs by his friend J.T. Nettleship. This volume deservedly attracted great admiration.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown were among O'Shaughnessy's circle of friends.

He published 2 more collections of poetry: Lays of France in 1872, and Music and Moonlight in 1874. When he was 30 he married, and did not produce any more volumes of poetry for the last 7 years of his life.

In 1873 he married Eleanor, daughter of Westland Marston, a lady of considerable literary accomplishments, with whom he wrote a book of tales for children, entitled Toyland (1875). She died in January 1879, and he deplored her death in an elegy of great beauty.

Enthusiastically devoted to modern French belles-lettres, and writing French with the elegance and accuracy of an accomplished native, he possessed unusual qualifications for interpreting the literature of either country to the other, and might have come to exert more influence as a critic than he could have obtained as a poet.

On 30 Jan. 1881, just as he was beginning to take an important place in general literature as the English correspondent of Le Livre, and when he was about to contract a 2nd marriage, he succumbed to the effects of a chill contracted on leaving the theater on a bitterly cold night.

Writing

Epic of Women, and other poems deservedly attracted great admiration by the spontaneous melody of its lyrical verse, as well as by the dramatic force and passion of some of the more elaborate pieces. The expectations thus created were not fulfilled by his Lays of France (1872), chiefly adapted from the poems of Marie de France; and although Music and Moonlight (1874) would have commanded attention if it had been his debut work, it resembled a weaker repetition of An Epic of Women,' except for traces of a new vein in "Europe" and some other poems charged with political allusions.

His posthumous poems were published in 1881 under the title of Songs of a Worker. They do not in general indicate any advance upon his earlier compositions, but include some fine poems on sculpture, a subject to which he had latterly given much attention.

O'Shaughnessy's temperament was that of a genuine poet. His slender frame and spiritual expression recalled Chopin, and his best poetry has the characteristics of Chopin's music — dreamy and sometimes weird, with an original, delicious, and inexhaustible melody.

Some pieces, such as "Palm Flowers," display, in addition, a remarkable faculty of gorgeous word-painting; others, such as the "Daughter of Herodias," possess much dramatic intensity, others fascinate by a semi-sensuous mysticism, and "Chaitivel" and "Bisclavaret" are wildly imaginative.

All these gifts, however, except that of verbal music, seemed to dwindle as the poet advanced in years, and their decay was not compensated by growth in intellectual power. The range of O'Shaughnessy's ideas and sympathies was narrow, and when the original lyrical impulse had subsided, or degenerated into a merely mechanical fluency, he found himself condemned, for the most part, to sterile repetition.

His premature death restricts his claims to remembrance mainly to his 1st volume, which will always hold a place in English literature from its wealth of fancy and melody, and its marked individuality of style.

Critical introduction

by Edmund Gosse

The same month that saw O’Shaughnessy’s death deprived English literature of one of its most vigorous representatives, a woman who had no less ambition than he had to excel in verse. In the chorus of praise and regret which followed George Eliot to the grave, O’Shaughnessy passed away almost unperceived. As far as intellect is concerned he had no claim to be mentioned near her. But in poetry the battle is not always to the strong, and he seems to have possessed, what we all confess that she lacked, the indescribable quality which gives the smallest warbler admission to that forkèd hill from which Bacon and Hobbes are excluded.

In O’Shaughnessy this quality was thin, and soon exhausted. His earliest book had most of it; his posthumous book, which ought never to have been published, had none of it. It was volatile, and evaporated with the passage of youth. But when his work has been thoroughly sifted, there will be found to remain a small residuum of exquisite poetry, full of odour and melody, all in one key, and essentially unlike the verse of anyone else.

I have ventured to indicate as the central feature of this poetry its habit of etherealising human feeling, and of looking upon mundane emotion as the broken echo of a subtle and supernatural passion. This is what seems to make O’Shaughnessy’s best pieces, such as "The Fountain of Tears", "Barcarolle", "There is an Earthly Glimmer in the Tomb", "Song of Betrothal", "Outcry", and even, as the reverse of the medal, the were-wolf ballad of "Bisclaveret", so delicate and unique. We have nothing else quite like them in English; the Germans had a kindred product in the songs of Novalis.

Critical reputation

By far the most noted and anthologized of any his works are the initial stanzas of the "Ode" from his book Music and Moonlight (1874).

Anthologist Francis Turner Palgrave in his work The Golden Treasury declared that of the modern poets, despite his limited output, O'Shaughnessy had a gift in some ways 2nd only to Tennyson, and "a haunting music all his own."

Recognition

"Ode" was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

Sir Edward Elgar set the "Ode" to music in 1912 in his work entitled The Music Makers, Op 69. The work was dedicated to Elgar's old friend Nicholas Kilburn and the debut performance took place at the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival in 1912. Performances available include: The Music Makers, with Sir Adrian Boult conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1975 (reissued 1999), paired with Elgar's Dream of Gerontius; and the 2006 album Sea Pictures paired with The Music Makers, Simon Wright conducting the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) also set the ode to music in his work Music Makers, dedicated to Merton College, Oxford on the occasion of its 700th anniversary in 1964.

In popular culture

He was also alluded to by Neil Gaiman in his extremely popular series The Sandman in the guise of the envoy of the Endless, Eblis O'Shaughnessy.

The line "We are the music makers / and we are the dreamers of the dreams" has been quoted or used in many different media. A few examples include:

• spoken by Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
• used as the opening line of Living Legends song "Nothing Less (ft. Slug)".
• included in motivation speech by Herb Brooks before the U.S. Hockey Team beat the Russian team in the 1980 Winter Olympics.
• used in the Aphex Twin song, "We are the Music Makers" from the album Selected Ambient Works 85-92.
• the first two lines were used by Kuffdam & Plant as lyrics on their single "We are the Dream Makers"
• used in the 2003 High Contrast remix of "Barcelona," originally produced by D.Kay & Epsilon.
• quoted by the character Roger in season 5, episode 6 of the television series American Dad!
• used in the Buckethead song "Seaside" from "Blueprints", the first line is a quote of Gene Wilder's line.
• often quoted in the Church of Scientology's Celebrity Centre's Celebrity Magazine.(Citation needed)
• spoken by King Unique in "Tyrane - King Of The Invisible Land (Henry Saiz's We Are The Music Makers 303 Remix)" in the 2011 CD Balance 019 Mixed by Henry Saiz

The entire ode is quoted in the opening of "Dreamers of Dreams: An Anthology of Webfiction" (2011), an ebook anthology series of online fiction, as well as inspiring the name of the series.

"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" was used by Mack Reynolds as the opening dedication (and title to) his novel "Trample an Empire Down" (1978).

Publications

Poetry

• An Epic of Women, and other poems. London: J.C. Hotten, 1870.
  • New York: Garland, 1978.
• Lays of France (founded on the Lays of Marie) . London, Ellis and Green, 1872.
• Music and Moonlight: Poems and songs. London: Chatto & Windus, 1874.
  • New York: Garland, 1977.
• Songs of a Worker. London: Chatto & Windus, 1881.
• Louise Chandler Moulton, Arthur O'Shaughnessy: His life and his work, with selections from his poems. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane / Cambridge, MA: Stone & Kimball, 1894.
• Poems of Arthur O'Shaughnessy (edited by William Alexander Percy). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923.

Short fiction

• Toyland (with Eleanor O'Shaughnessy). London: Daldy, Isbister, & Co., 1875.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat..

Poems by Arthur O'Shaughnessy

"Ode" by Arthur O'Shaughnessy A Visual Poem

1. Ode

See also

• List of British poets

References

•  Garrett, Richard (1895) "O'Shaughnessy, Arthur William Edgar" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 42 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 408-409 . Wikisource, Web, Feb. 17, 2018.
• Arthur O'Shaughnessy: a biography Molly Whittington-Egan (in progress) Rivendale Press

Fonds

• List of O'Shaughnessy papers held at Queen's University Belfast

External links

Poems

• "Ode"
• "Song: Has summer come without the rose?"
• O'Shaughnessy, Arthur (1844-1881) ("Ode") at Representative Poetry Online
• Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1844-1881 at the Poetry Foundation
• Arthur O'Shaughnessy in the Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse: "The Lover", "En Soph"
• O'Shaughnessy in The English Poets: An anthology: "From "Bisclavert" (Epic of Woman), Song: "Has summer come without the rose" (from Lays of France), Song: "I made another garden, yea" (from Music and Moonlight)
• O'Shaughnessy in A Victorian Anthology: "The Fair Maid and the Sun," "Has Summer Come without the Rose?", "At Her Grave," "Silences," "If She but Knew"
• Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy at PoemHunter (8 poems)
• Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy at Poetry Nook (38 poems)
• Arthur O'Shaughnessy poems at YouTube

About

• Arthur O'Shaughnessy in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
• Arthur O'Shaughnessy in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: O'Shaughnessy, Arthur William Edgar