Life and Death
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.
“Life and Death” originally appeared in The Widening Light (Walter Reid, 1922).
Carrie Williams Clifford
Carrie Williams Clifford was born in September 1862 in Chillicothe, Ohio. A poet and activist, she is the author of The Widening Light (Walter Reid, 1922) and Race Rhymes (R. L. Pendleton, 1911).
A cofounder 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. She taught in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and worked as an editor for the Cleveland Journal. She died in 1934.