Destiny

By Sophie Jewett 1861–1909 Sophie Jewett

A noisome thing that crawls by covert path,

For glad, unfearing feet to lie in wait;

No part in summer’s fellowship it hath,

From mirth and love and music alienate.

Yet once it flashed across the close, brown grass

In the noon sun, and, as it quivered there,

The spell of beauty over it did pass,

Making it kin with earth and light and air.

I knew that Life’s imperial self decrees

That this, the loathliest of living things,

By patient ways of cycled centuries,

Slow creeping, shall at last attain to wings.

Source: The Poems of Sophie Jewett (1910)

Biography

Born in Moravia, New York, poet Sophie Jewett was the daughter of a country doctor. Her childhood was marked by loss and displacement. When she was seven years old, her mother died, and Jewett was summoned from sleep to observe her passing; her father died two years later. After his death, Jewett and her three siblings moved to Buffalo to live with their uncle and grandmother, both of whom died during Jewett’s adolescence.

Jewett . . .

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