"Ode" begins with a chorus. Together, a group speaks as one: "We are the music makers, / And we are the dreamers of dreams." This "Ode" will be an ode to artists, sung by artists: a piece of art about the nature of art.
These "music makers" seem to be set apart: they're "world-losers and world-forsakers," monk-like people who turn away from everyday reality. Their dreaming takes them to isolated places, "lone" and "desolate" bodies of water under the "pale moon." The sibilance of those "lone sea-breakers" and "desolate streams" gives their wanderings a hushed, magical quality. These singers are solitary, nocturnal creatures, and they seem to feel a kinship with remote and mysterious landscapes.
But there's a paradox here: these lonely singers are also a group, a "we." And as a collective, they are a world-changing force. For all that they wander alone, they are "movers and shakers," people who change the world. This tension between artistic isolation and artistic power will be one of the major themes of this poem.
There's another paradox here, too: the relationship between what's eternal and what's mutable. The reader has probably heard the saying that the only constant in the world is change. The "movers and shakers / Of the world for ever" indeed seem to deal in eternally changing matters, and dense patterns of repetition in both the poem's images and its language underscore that point. Image-wise, the speakers place themselves in landscapes associated with both eternity and change: the constant but never-the-same-twice movements of waves and rivers, and the always-cycling moon.
The poem's echoing sounds reflect that feeling of eternal change with strong alliteration ("music makers," "dreamers of dreams"), diacope ("world-losers and world-forsakers"), and polyptoton ("dreamers of dreams"). Here, themes of change and repetition are baked right into the poem's sounds. Something similar happens with the rhyme scheme, where a steady, musical ABAB pattern draws the reader's attention to a rhythm of similarity and difference.