Todd Boss on Emma Lazarus

Todd Boss's Poetry Month Pick, April 16, 2008 from Poetry Daily.

"The New Colossus"
by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)

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-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

* * * * *

Todd Boss Comments:
Emma, Dear, let’s face it: As a poet, you were a sentimental amateur. You were pen-pals with Emerson, but you got good too late; you died at 37. So how, with this stirring little poem, did you manage to reinterpret one of the greatest monuments of the modern age?

I know that in 1883, when you wrote this poem, you were troubled by media reports of the plight of your fellow Jews in czarist Russia. You had exiles on your mind.

You had read of sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi and his monumental project: to create for America the awesome statue of a woman, modeled after the fallen Colossus of Rhodes, lifting a beacon high above her crowned head and the waters of the Atlantic, across which so many exiles had already come.

But a beacon to exiles was not what Bartholdi created, and her name is not “Mother of Exiles” as you call her. What today we refer to as the “Statue of Liberty” was christened “Liberty Enlightens the World” by Bartholdi, who, over dinner with a French activist friend in 1865, conceived of her as a way to signal a new age for his beloved France. In fact, the statue was positioned to gaze directly across the ocean upon France, where things were not so good, politically. In the 1870s, when Bartholdi worked hardest on designs and early models, she was forged as a vision for a France humiliated by Germany and ravaged by anarchy. Napoleon had fled to Versailles and Paris was still bloody with chaos and Communard reprisals.

Not only did you rename her, Emma, but you completely reframed her. Such is the colossal power of poetry, when it is given proper stature. Bartholdi saw a woman with a torch, raising a republican standard for France and a tyrannized Europe; but you saw her as a beacon for their disenfranchised. Her “beacon-hand” didn’t glow with “world-wide welcome” in Bartholdi’s conception, but with democratic enlightenment. Liberty wore the cloak of art, but her subtext was propagandist, the chains of tyranny broken at her feet. She was meant to illumine a way for the world, not an escape route from it.

And yet, to this day, we see her through your eyes, Emma Lazarus, and summon her with your words. Presidential candidates recite your lines in key speeches, and debates about immigration policy still take place half in and half out of the torchlight of a poem that turned a statue’s seaward gaze inland—rearticulating Liberty, and the psyche of a nation.

About Todd Boss:
Todd Boss is the Director of External Affairs at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. His first book of poems, YELLOWROCKET, is due from W. W. Norton in November. Read (and hear) more of his poems at www.toddbosspoet.com.

Tags: Todd Boss, Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, Poetry Daily, National Poetry Month