The New Year

Carrie Williams Clifford

The New Year comes—fling wide, fling wide the door
Of Opportunity! the spirit free
To scale the utmost heights of hopes to be,
To rest on peaks ne’er reached by man before!
The boundless infinite let us explore,
To search out undiscovered mystery,
Undreamed of in our poor philosophy!
The bounty of the gods upon us pour!
Nay, in the New Year we shall be as gods:
No longer apish puppets or dull clods
Of clay; but poised, empowered to command,
Upon the Etna of New Worlds we’ll stand—
This scant earth-raiment to the winds will cast—
Full richly robed as supermen at last!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on January 1, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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.

About Carrie Williams Clifford

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Themes

About this Poem

“The New Year” first appeared as “For the New Year” in The Crisis XIX, no. 4 (February, 1920).