For some unknown reason, certain phrases within dramas and/or poems become enshrined in the language. The first lines of this for example, and the phrase ‘movers and shakers’.
In any case when you are next in the Town Hall, you might choose to draw attention to the inscription around the balcony’s frontage (the first couplet of this poem) and flaunt your knowledge!
We are the music-makers
And we are the dreamer 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.
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.
Arthur O’Shaughnessy