Poems

Find and share the perfect poems.

A Friendship

1861 –

1909

Small fellowship of daily commonplace
   We hold together, dear, constrained to go
   Diverging ways. Yet day by day I know
My life is sweeter for thy life’s sweet grace;
And if we meet but for a moment’s space,
   Thy touch, thy word, sets all the world aglow.
   Faith soars serener, haunting doubts shrink low,
   Abashed before the sunshine of thy face.
Nor press of crowd, nor waste of distance serves
   To part us. Every hush of evening brings
   Some hint of thee, true-hearted friend of mine;
And as the father planet thrills and swerves
   When towards it through the darkness Saturn swings,
   Even so my spirit feels the spell of thine.

¹⁸⁸⁸

Sophie Jewett, a poet, translator, and professor, was born on June 3, 1861, in Moravia, New York, to Dr. Charles Carroll Jewett, a country physician, and Ellen Ransom Burroughs. Jewett’s father died during her childhood, prompting the family, including her two sisters and brother, to move to Buffalo, New York. Around age twenty, she traveled to England and Italy, usually in the company of one of her sisters, who was an artist. Her sojourns in the latter country inspired what became Italian Sketches (Suburban Press, 1917).

Themes

Form

Sign up for Poem-a-Day

More by this poet

Mignonne

^{Fourteenth Century Form}

Mignonne, whose face bends low for my caressing,
New and unknown to-night thy beauty seemeth;
Dimly I read thine eyes as one who dreameth.

Sophie Jewett

1910

I Speak Your Name

I speak your name in alien ways, while yet
November smiles from under lashes wet.
In the November light I see you stand
Who love the fading woods and withered land,
Where Peace may walk, and Death, but not Regret.

Sophie Jewett

1910

Across the Fields

Across the fields, the happy fields that lay
Unfaded yet, one visionary day
We walked together, and the world was sweet.
Each heard the whisper neither might repeat,
Love's whisper underneath our light word-play.

Sophie Jewett

1910

Poems

Page submenu block

A Friendship

More by this poet

Mignonne

I Speak Your Name

Across the Fields

Newsletter Sign Up