By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, May 22, 2005
When Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was asked to compose a poem for a proposed immense statue representing "Liberty Enlightening the World," by the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, she at first rejected the commission, apparently reluctant to compose on assignment. So writes John Hollander in his introduction to the new Library of America volume Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems . She may also have felt the limitations of writing a poem to be used as a means of attracting donors to the project.
As Hollander points out, it is extremely good. If you read attentively beyond the familiar phrases, and beyond the literary conventions of Lazarus's historical moment, the freshness of imagination in "The New Colossus" is striking:
The New ColossusNot 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-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The brass ("brazen") Colossus of Rhodes embodies conquest, while this statue, a woman, is the "Mother of Exiles," with a lamp instead of a weapon. Mighty and commanding yet mild-eyed, she unites the two cities of New York and Brooklyn (then still a separate municipality). Not only are the famous last six lines well written, but "the air-bridged harbor" recalls the language of Hart Crane.
This brilliant poet died of cancer before she was 40. Her sister, "by this time an Anglo-Catholic convert," in Hollander's words, prevented publication of a Complete Poems in 1926 because so much of Lazarus's material was Jewish. Hollander calls attention to another sonnet, "1492": The year of Columbus's discovery was also the year that Spain, in the heyday of the Inquisition, expelled all Jews:
1492Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford,
Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.
Then smiling, thou unveil'dst, O two-faced year,
A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
Saying, "Ho, all who weary, enter here!
There falls each ancient barrier that the art
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!"
The two poems -- "sunset gates" and "doors of sunset" -- with their ideal of "harbor" and "anchorage" from the past, embody a vision that deserves its place in national memory.
