She is herself the personification of freedom, of course, the Roman goddess Libertas.
#EMMA LAZARUS POEM FREE#
It’s as if she says, We aspire to be free - now come, all you who yearn for freedom. Such tablets were common in ancient Greece for inscribing prayers, or in any case aspirations - and on this particular tablet is the date the United States formally broke from English rule: July 4, 1776. No, this statue holds a beacon in her hand, signaling nothing less than “world-wide welcome.” Her name is “Mother of Exiles.” She is unarmed, a light in one hand and a votive tablet in the other. This new colossus, Lazarus insists, is “not like” the Greek Colossus, domineering and male, which in the third century BCE stood at the harbor of the island of Rhodes, like some conquering warrior and guardian. And sure enough, “The New Colossus” is itself a multicultural amalgam: an Italian sonnet written by a Jewish-American woman, celebrating a statue forged in France, contrasting it with one in ancient Greece. When Lazarus wrote this poem in 1883, immigrants were entering the United States in great numbers, including Italians, French, Greeks, and Russian-Jewish refugees, among others. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. Glows world-wide welcome her mild eyes command Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand With conquering limbs astride from land to land
0 kommentar(er)
