
| Carrie Williams Clifford |
| My goal out-distances the utmost star, Yet is encompassed in my inmost Soul; I am my goal—my quest, to know myself. To chart and compass this unfathomed sea, Myself must plumb the boundless universe. My Soul contains all thought, all mystery, All wisdom of the Great Infinite Mind: This is to discover, I must voyage far, At last to find it in my pulsing heart. |
| This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on February 8, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets. |
“Quest” 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 African-American 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. |