Emma Lazarus

Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,
Before the mystery of death and God.

Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish and Georgist causes.

Quotes

• The Jewish problem is as old as history and assumes in each age a new form. All the magnanimity, patience, charity, and humanity, which the Jews have manifested in return for centuries of persecution, have been thus far inadequate to eradicate the profound antipathy engendered by fanaticism and ready to break out in one or another shape at any moment of popular excitement.
  • "The Jewish Problem", The Century Magazine, vol. 25, no. 4 (February 1883), p. 603

• The word "Jew" is in constant use, even among so-called refined Christians, as a term of opprobrium, and is employed as a verb, to denote the meanest tricks.
  • "The Jewish Problem", p. 608

Poems and Translations (1866)

And o'er thee e'er is arched the rainbow's span, —
The gorgeous marriage-ring of Earth and Heaven.
While ever from the holy altar grand
Ascends the incense of the mist and spray,
That mounts to God with thy wild roar of praise.

• Thou art a giant altar, where the Earth
  Must needs send up her thanks to Him above
  Who did create her.
  • "Niagara", l. 1
  • Clifton-House, Niagara Falls, Canada (August 24, 1865)

• The burning noon sends floods of molten gold,
  The calm night crowns thee with its host of stars,
  The moon enfolds thee with her silver veil,
  And o'er thee e'er is arched the rainbow's span, —
  The gorgeous marriage-ring of Earth and Heaven.
  While ever from the holy altar grand
  Ascends the incense of the mist and spray,
  That mounts to God with thy wild roar of praise.
  • "Niagara", l. 7

Admetus and Other Poems (1871)

• Sweet empty sky of June without a stain,
  Faint, gray-blue dewy mists on far-off hills
  Warm, yellow sunlight flooding mead and plain,
  That each dark copse and hollow overfills.
  • "Epochs", no. I: "Youth"

• Here, where the noises of the busy town,
  The ocean's plunge and roar can enter not,
  We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
  And muse upon the consecrated spot.
  No signs of life are here: the very prayers
  Inscribed around are in a language dead;
  The light of the "perpetual lamp" is spent
  That an undying radiance was to shed.
  • "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport", sts. 1-2
  • Touro Synagogue, Newport, RI (July 1867)

What prayers were in this temple offered up,
Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!

• What prayers were in this temple offered up,
  Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
  By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
  From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!
  • "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport", st. 3

• Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains, —
  The exiles by the streams of Babylon.
  • "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport", st. 7

• The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,
  All found their comfort in the holy place,
  And children's gladness and men's gratitude
  'Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.
  The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
  We know not which is sadder to recall;
  For youth and happiness have followed age,
  And green grass lieth gently over all.
  • "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport", sts. 9-10

• Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,
  With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.
  Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,
  Before the mystery of death and God.
  • "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport", st. 11

Songs of a Semite (1882)

• Oh deem not dead that martial fire,
  Say not the mystic flame is spent!
  With Moses' law and David's lyre.
  Your ancient strength remains unbent.
  Let but an Ezra rise anew,
  To lift the Banner of the Jew!
  • "The Banner of the Jew", st. 5

• The Spirit is not dead, proclaim the word,
  Where lay dead bones, a host of armed men stand!
  I ope your graves, my people, saith the Lord,
  And I shall place you living in your land.
  • "The New Ezekiel", l. 13

• His cup is gall, his meat is tears,
  His passion lasts a thousand years.
  • "The Crowing of the Red Cock", st. 2

• Blow, Israel, the sacred cornet! Call
  Back to thy courts whatever faint heart throb
  With thine ancestral blood, thy need craves all.
  • "The New York: Rosh-Hashanah", 5643", st. 3

• Each separate soul contains the nation’s force,
  And both embrace the world.
  • "The New York: Rosh-Hashanah", 5643", st. 7

• The hounded stag that has escaped the pack,
  And pants at ease within a thick-leaved dell;
  The unimprisoned bird that finds the track
  Through sun-bathed space, to where his fellows dwell;
  The martyr, granted respite from the rack,
  The death-doomed victim pardoned from his cell, —
  Such only know the joy these exiles gain, —
  Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain.
  • "In Exile", st. 3

• Freedom to love the law that Moses brought,
  To sing the songs of David, and to think
  The thoughts Gabirol to Spinoza taught,
  Freedom to dig the common earth, to drink
  The universal air — for this they sought
  Refuge o'er wave and continent, to link
  Egypt with Texas in their mystic chain,
  And truth's perpetual lamp forbid to wane.
  • "In Exile", st. 5

The Poems of Emma Lazarus (1889)

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.

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!

• To his sunny creed
  A thousand gloomy, warring sects succeed.
  • "Agamemnon's Tomb", st. 5 (c. 1877)

• Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies
  Behold the Spirit of the musky South,
  A creole with still-burning, languid eyes,
  Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth.
  • "The South", st. 1 (c. 1878)

• 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-tost to me,
  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
  • "The New Colossus"
  • Written in aid of Bartholdi Pedestal Fund (1883)

• 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.
  • "1492", l. 3 (1883)

Down the long hall she glistens like a star,
The foam-born mother of Love, transfixed to stone.

• Down the long hall she glistens like a star,
  The foam-born mother of Love, transfixed to stone,
  Yet none the less immortal, breathing on.
  Time's brutal hand hath maimed but could not mar.
  • "Venus of the Louvre", l. 1 (c. 1884)

• A lady 'twixt two knights' stone effigies,
  And every day in dusky glory steeps
  Their sculptured slumber of five centuries.
  • "St Michael's Chapel", l. 12 (c. 1884)

• Then Nature shaped a poet's heart — a lyre
  From out whose chords the lightest breeze that blows
  Drew trembling music.
  • "Chopin", st. iv

• Lo — a black line of birds in wavering thread
  Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!
  • "The Cranes of Ibicus", l. 13

• Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned; this man is neither simple, sensuous, nor impassioned; therefore he is not a poet.
  • "Critic and Poet: An Apologue", epigraph
  • Compare John Milton: "simple, sensuous and passionate"—Of Education (1644)

• No man had ever heard a nightingale,
  When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred
  To study and define — what is a bird,
  To classify by rote and book, nor fail
  To mark its structure and to note the scale
  Whereon its song might possibly be heard.
  Thus far, no farther; — so he spake the word.
  When of a sudden, — hark, the nightingale!
  Oh deeper, higher than he could divine
  That all-unearthly, untaught strain! He saw
  The plain, brown warbler, unabashed. "Not mine"
  (He cried) "the error of this fatal flaw.
  No bird is this, it soars beyond my line,
  Were it a bird, 'twould answer to my law."
  • "Critic and Poet: An Apologue"

Nobler the conquered than the conqueror's end!

• If Victory makes the hero, raw Success
  The stamp of virtue, unremembered
  Be then the desperate strife, the storm and stress
  Of the last Warrior Jew. But if the man
  Who dies for freedom, loving all things less,
  Against world-legions, mustering his poor elan;
  The weak, the wronged, the miserable, to send
  Their death-cry's protest through the ages' span —
  If such an one be worthy, ye shall lend
  Eternal thanks to him, eternal praise.
  Nobler the conquered than the conqueror's end!
  • "Bar Kochba", l. 5

• Still ours the dance, the feast, the glorious Psalm,
  The mystic lights of emblem, and the Word.
  • "The Feast of Lights", st. 6

• Still on Israel's head forlorn,
  Every nation heaps its scorn.
  • "The World's Justice", st. 4

Quotes about Lazarus

• Only her indomitable will and intense desire to live seemed to keep her alive. She sunk to a very low ebb, but, as she herself expressed it, she "seemed to have always one little window looking out into life," and in the spring she rallied sufficiently to take a few drives and to sit on the balcony of her apartment. She came back to life with a feverish sort of thirst and avidity. "No such cure for pessimism," she says, "as a severe illness; the simplest pleasures are enough — to breathe the air and see the sun."
  • Account of her final months, from her obituary: "Emma Lazarus", in The Century Magazine, vol. 36, no. 6 (October 1888), p. 884. Variant: "I seem to have always one little window looking out into life."^{[citation needed]}

• Another founding mother was the American Emma Lazarus, who was affected as much by her country's civil war as by the Russian pogroms in the late nineteenth century...Lazarus perceived herself as a Sephardic Jew, but she didn't want to isolate herself from the contemporary American literary community. When her friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson failed to include her poems in his anthology Parnassus (1874), which included works by prominent and promising national poets, Lazarus wrote him an angry letter. "I cannot resist the impulse of expressing to you my extreme disappointment at finding you have so far modified the enthusiastic estimate you held of my literary labors as to refuse me a place in the large & miscellaneous collection of poems you have just edited," she wrote. And so, she wondered why "I find myself treated with absolute contempt in the very quarter where I had been encouraged to build my fondest hopes." Her letter to Emerson might be read in at least two ways: as a woman's angry response to the "arbitrary" exclusion by a prominent male critic and essayist from "a fair share of immortality"; and as the response by a Jew, as a member of an ethnic and religious minority, who felt that she had been discriminated against. It is interesting, therefore, to note that Lazarus sought to introduce American readers to figures such as Bar Kokhba, the Jewish soldier who led the final revolt against the Romans in Palestine in 132-35 CE, and to Rashi, the twelfth-century biblical and talmudic commentator from Troyes, France. She also wrote a poem about the Touro Synagogue, the famous Sephardic house of worship that was established in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1763. In addition to translating into English the poetry of the popular German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, Lazarus also translated poems by Ibn Gabirol, Halevi, and Ibn Ezra, thus building a bridge between Sephardic life in the United States and the medieval Hebrew past.
  • Ilan Stavans, Introduction to The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature (2005)

External links

• Works available at Project Gutenberg
• Collection of Emma Lazarus poems