Emma Lazarus, 1849 - 1887

Emma Lazarus, 1849 - 1887

Born on July 22, 1849, Lazarus was the fourth of Esther (Nathan) and Moses Lazarus's seven children. She grew up in New York and Newport, Rhode Island, and was educated by private tutors with whom she studied mythology, music, American poetry, European literature, German, French, and Italian. Her father, who was a successful sugar merchant, supported her writing financially as well as emotionally. In 1866, when Emma was only seventeen, Moses had Poems and Translations: Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Sixteen printed "for private circulation." Daughter Emma dedicated the volume "To My Father."
Soon after Poems and Translations was published, Lazarus met Ralph Waldo Emerson. The two corresponded until Emerson's death in 1882. During the early years of their relationship, Lazar-us turned to Emerson as her mentor, and he in turn praised and encouraged her writing. In 1871, when she published Admetus and Other Poems, she dedicated the title poem "To My Friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson." Despite his support, Emerson failed to include any of Lazarus's poetry in his 1874 anthology, Parnassus, but he did include authors such as Harriet Prescott Spofford and Julia C.R. Dorr. Lazarus responded with an uncharacteristically angry letter and subsequently modified her idealized image of Emerson.
However, student and mentor obviously reconciled; in 1876, Lazarus visited the Emersons in Concord, Massachusetts.

Admetus and Other Poems includes "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport" and "How Long" as well as translations from the Italian and German (Goethe and Heine). "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport" echoes in form and meter Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport." Yet where Longfellow's meditation closes with "the dead nations never rise again," Lazarus's reverie concludes by announcing that "the sacred shrine is holy yet." "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport" is one of Lazarus's earliest creative expressions of a Jewish consciousness. "How Long" is significant because its proclamation of the need for a "yet unheard of strain," one suitable to prairies, plains, wilderness, and snow-peaked mountains places Lazarus among those mid-nineteenth century American writers who wanted to create literature that did not depend on British outlines.

Lazarus published her next book, Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life, in 18 74. Her only novel, Alide is based on Goethe's own autobiographical writings and focuses on a love affair between the young Goethe and a country woman. The lovers part at the end, because the poet must be free to fulfill his "sacred office." Lazar-us's only other piece of fiction, a story titled "The Eleventh Hour," was published in 1878 in Scribner's. The story raises questions about the needs and rights of the artist, like Alide, and about the status of American art, like "How Long."

In 1876, Lazar-us privately published The Spagnoletto, a tragic verse drama. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, Lazarus's poems appeared in American magazines. Among these are "Outside the Church" (1872) in Index; "Phantasmagoria" (1876) and "The Christmas Tree" (1877) in Lippincott's; "The Taming of the Falcon" (1879) in the Century; and "Progress and Poverty" (18 8 1) in the New York Times.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles.  From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips.  "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

by Emma Lazarus, New York City, 1883

 

Emma Lazarus' famous words, "Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" may now be indelibly engraved into the collective American memory, but they did not achieve immortality overnight. In fact, Lazarus' sonnet to the Statue of Liberty was hardly noticed until after her death, when a patron of the New York arts found it tucked into a small portfolio of poems written in 1883 to raise money for the construction of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. The patron, Georgina Schuyler, was struck by the poem and arranged to have its last five lines become a permanent part of the statue itself. More than twenty years later, children's textbooks began to include the sonnet and Irving Berlin wrote it into a broadway musical. By 1945, the engraved poem was relocated--including all fourteen lines-- to be placed over the Statue of Liberty's main entrance.
Today the words themselves may be remembered a great degree more than the poet herself, but in Lazarus' time just the opposite was true. As a member of New York's social elite, Emma Lazarus enjoyed a privileged childhood, nurtured by her family to become a respected poet recognized throughout the country for verses about her Jewish heritage. A reader and a dreamer, Lazarus had the good fortune to claim Ralph Waldo Emerson as a pen-pal and mentor. Before her death at age 37, Lazarus grew from a sheltered girl writing flowery prose about Classical Antiquity to a sophisticated New York aristocrat troubled by the violent injustices suffered by Jews in Eastern Europe.
In "The New Colossus," Lazarus contrasts the soon-to-be installed symbol of the United States with what many consider the perfect symbol of the Greek and Roman era, the Colossus of Rhodes. Her comparison proved appropriate, for Bartholdi himself created the Statue of Liberty with the well-known Colossus in mind. What Bartholdi did not intend, however, was for the Statue of Liberty to become a symbol of welcome for thousands of European immigrants. As political propaganda for France, the Statue of Liberty was first intended to be a path of enlightenment for the countries of Europe still battling tyranny and oppression. Lazarus' words, however, turned that idea on its head: the Statue of Liberty would forever on be considered a beacon of welcome for immigrants leaving their mother countries.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset fates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Heroes

In rich Virginian woods,

The scarlet creeper reddens over graves,

Among the solemn trees enlooped with vines;

Heroic spirits haunt the solitudes, —

The noble souls of half a million braves,

Amid the murmurous pines.

Ah! who is left behind,

Earnest and eloquent, sincere and strong,

To consecrate their memories with words

Not all unmeet? with fitting dirge and song

To chant a requiem purer than the wind,

And sweeter than the birds?

Here, though all seems at peace,

The placid, measureless sky serenely fair,

The laughter of the breeze among the leaves,

The bars of sunlight slanting through the trees,

The reckless wild-flowers blooming everywhere,

The grasses' delicate sheaves, —

Nathless each breeze that blows,

Each tree that trembles to its leafy head

With nervous life, revives within our mind,

Tender as flowers of May, the thoughts of those

Who lie beneath the living beauty, dead, —

Beneath the sunshine, blind.

For brave dead soldiers, these:

Blessings and tears of aching thankfulness,

Soft flowers for the graves in wreaths enwove,

The odorous lilac of dear memories,

The heroic blossoms of the wilderness,

And the rich rose of love.

But who has sung their praise,

Not less illustrious, who are living yet?

Armies of heroes, satisfied to pass

Calmly, serenely from the whole world's gaze,

And cheerfully accept, without regret,

Their old life as it was,

With all its petty pain,

Its irritating littleness and care;

They who have scaled the mountain, with content

Sublime, descend to live upon the plain;

Steadfast as though they breathed the mountain-air

Still, wheresoe'er they went.

They who were brave to act,

And rich enough their action to forget;

Who, having filled their day with chivalry,

Withdraw and keep their simpleness intact,

And all unconscious add more luster yet

Unto their victory.

On the broad Western plains

Their patriarchal life they live anew;

Hunters as mighty as the men of old,

Or harvesting the plenteous, yellow grains,

Gathering ripe vintage of dusk bunches blue,

Or working mines of gold;

Or toiling in the town,

Armed against hindrance, weariness, defeat,

With dauntless purpose not to swerve or yield,

And calm, defiant strength, they struggle on,

As sturdy and as valiant in the street,

As in the camp and field.

And those condemned to live,

Maimed, helpless, lingering still through suffering years,

May they not envy now the restful sleep

Of the dear fellow-martyrs they survive?

Not o'er the dead, but over these, your tears,

O brothers, ye may weep!

New England fields I see,

The lovely, cultured landscape, waving grain,

Wide, haughty rivers, and pale, English skies.

And lo! A farmer ploughing busily,

Who lifts a swart face, looks upon the plain, —

I see, in his frank eyes,

The hero's soul appear.

Thus in the common fields and streets they stand;

The light that on the past and distant gleams,

They cast upon the present and the near,

With antique virtues from some mystic land,

Of knightly deeds and dreams.

Crowing of the Red Cock

Across the Eastern sky has flowed

The flicker of a blood-red dawn,

Once more the clarion cock has crowed,

Once more the sword of Christ is drawn.

A million burning rooftrees light

The world-wide path of Israel's flight.

Where is the Hebrew's fatherland?

The folk of Christ is sore bestead;

The Son of Man is bruised and banned,

Nor finds whereon to lay his head.

His cup is gall, his meat is tears,

His passion lasts a thousand years.

Each crime that wakes in man the beast,

Is visited upon his kind.

The lust of mobs, the greed of priest,

The tyranny of kings, combined

To root his seed from earth again,

His record is one cry of pain.

When the long roll of Christian guilt

Against his sires and kin is known,

The flood of tears, the life-blood split,

The agony of ages shown,

What oceans can the stain remove,

From Christian law and Christian love?

Nay, close the book; not now, not here,

The hideous tale of sin narrate,

Reechoing in the martyr's ear,

Even he might nurse revengeful hate,

Even he might turn in wrath sublime,

With blood for blood and crime for crime.

Coward? Not he, who faces death,

Who singly against worlds has fought,

For what? A name he may not breathe,

For liberty of prayer and thought.

The angry sword he will not whet,

His nobler task is — to forget.