Emma Lazarus
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!

Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American poet and playwright, born in New York City.

Quotes

  • I seem to have always one little window looking but into life.
    • From her obituary in Century Magazine
  • Poetry must be simple, sensuous, or impassioned.
    • From Critic and Poet - An Apologue
  • 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:
    • Beginning lines from Epochs I. Youth.
  • 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.
  • Then Nature shaped a poet's heart — a lyre
    From out whose chords the lightest breeze that blows
    Drew trembling music.
  • No man had ever heard a nightingale,
    When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred
    To study and define — what is a bird.
  • Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains, —
    The exiles by the streams of Babylon.
    • In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport
  • The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
    We know not which is sadder to recall.
    • In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport
  • A lady 'twixt two knights' stone effigies,
    And every day in dusky glory steeps
    Their sculptured slumber of five centuries.
  • Lo — a black line of birds in wavering thread
    Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!
  • 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!
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