April 11, 2021

Life and Death

Carrie Williams Clifford

Life

I saw the candle brightly burning in the room!
The fringed curtains gracefully draped back,
The windows, crystal clear!
Upon the generous hearth
Quick Wit and bubbling Laughter
Flashed and danced
Sparkled and pranced,
And music to the glowing scene lent cheer.
It was a gracious sight,
So full of life, of love, of light!

Death

Then suddenly I saw a cloud of gloom
Take form within the room:
A blue-grey mist obscured the window-panes
And silent fell the rout!
Then from the shadows came the Dreaded Shape,—
The candle flickered out!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 11, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Life and Death” originally appeared in The Widening Light (Walter Reid, 1922).

Carrie Williams Clifford was born in September 1862 in Chillicothe, Ohio. A poet and activist, she is the author of Race Rhymes (R. L. Pendleton, 1911) and The Widening Light (Walter Reid, 1922). A co-founder and the first president of the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women, Clifford hired Black women for the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the NAACP.

The Widening Light
(Walter Reid, 1922)

“Life and Art” by Aldous Huxley
read more

“Flash” by Hazel Hall
read more

Thanks to Jane Hirshfield, author of Ledger (Knopf, 2020), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read a Q&A about Hirshfield’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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"Life and Death" by Carrie Williams Clifford

Life and Death

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast

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