“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”
This is not just the most famous quote from a poem by Lazarus, they rank among—at least—the ten most famous lines of poetry ever written by an American. “The New Colossus” is, of course, the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty which is identified by name as Mother of Exiles within the actual text. The speaker imagines the statue talking—it is not a literal case of the statue coming to life. But the imagined discourse is framed within quotation marks and so it properly attributed to the statue. The concept is coherent: the statue itself was foreseen by the poet as metaphorically saying “welcome” to every immigrant arriving into New York by ship from across the Atlantic.
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.
Emma Lazarus is most famous for the poet that is associated with the Statue of Liberty, but her authorship was not the result of being some random winner of a contest. She had earned the distinction of writing those words as a result of a career’s worth of interest and education about the state of immigrant life and the historical record. The opening lines of this poem character the title year as “two-faced” because in addition the more famous event which took place that year aboard the fleet of ships captained by Christopher Columbus was a decree from the very same royal couple commissioning those explorations to expel all Jews from Spain. The two unrelated events become inextricably combined into a hope that the New World would also be new in the sense of jettisoning old prejudices and welcoming refugees and outcasts to its shores.
Oft have I brooded on defeat and pain,
The pathos of the stupid, stumbling throng.
These I ignore to-day
Emma Lazarus was very intelligent and successful woman at a time when nothing scared the average man more than a very intelligent and successful woman. One can palpably feel the emotions of exasperation in this opening lines of this poem. It is a sign of her empathy that leavens the harshness of the criticism of the masses of people as stupid and stumbling by recognizing them as also being worth of pity, but as the poem moves on toward an exultation of those intelligent and successful like herself it becomes too obvious to ignore that her natural sympathies had been reaching breaking points. It has been noted that for the intelligent person life is bound to become a tragedy. Part of the implication of that tragic state is the recognition of the infinite supply of energy that is wasted by the foolish and it is that tragic recognition which fuels this celebration of conservation of energy.
