Interpretation Of The First Three Stanzas Of "Ode" By Arthur O'Shaughnessy

'We are the music makers,'

there is a literal meaning to it; as the text is about artists, those who create music - musicians - are included too. but i think there is also a second meaning. remember sayings like "the music stopped for him". not literal music, but the music that gets and keeps things going. and this is what artists, poets also create.

  'And we are the dreamers of dreams,'

i see three meanings here. poets and artists do dream a lot and dreams are a source for their art. but they also create dreams in and by their works; they are the ones who are 'doing it'; they dream those dreams.
but there is also a kind of super aspect. *the* dreamers of dreams. dreams of dreams. not just ordinary dreamers but those who are the source of dreams, the creators of the stuff the populace dreams about then.

'Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
  And sitting by desolate streams;—'

that's where you find poets and artist.

'World-losers and world-forsakers,  
  On whom the pale moon gleams:'

some have turned to art because they lost the world; they lost their families their social standing or economic positions. others have chosen to reject these by choice and became artists. but whatever way they walked, they are not part of the world, of everyday life anymore.

'Yet we are the movers and shakers
  Of the world for ever, it seems.'

but even though that as persons they are not part of the world, the poets and artists are the ones that keep the world turning and changing.

'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;'

cities, empires, cultures, civilizations were not built by economists or rulers or kings and princes; they were fashioned after an ideal, a dream, a vision a belief; and it's the poets and artists that create these ideas and beliefs.

'And three with a new song's measure  
  Can trample a kingdom down.'

and it's also the artists who can take the idea away again, and the empires will be bound to sink below again.

'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;'

a repetition of the abovementioned idea. the artists fashion ideals after which empires rise; but when that ideal wanes; new ones will be created and a new empire will come to life on the ashes of the old.

'For each age is a dream that is dying,
  Or one that is coming to birth.'

again, an age, a civilization, a period, is not shaped on an economical basis or on societal power or on money or military or the ruling glass; it follows an ideal, first written down by poets and artists; and when the understanding of this ideal becomes imperfect, a civilization falls; and a new ideal can rise.

the artists are the ones that write down the dreams; the dreams that the world follows.