"The New Colossus," by Emma Lazarus

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!”

+ Emma Lazarus

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. 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, and contrasting it with another in ancient Greece.

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. 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. 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. It’s as if she says, We aspire to be free — now come, all you who yearn for freedom.

She is herself the personification of freedom, of course, the Roman goddess Libertas. But compare her with Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting, Liberty Leading the People, in which Libertas carries a battle flag and gun. No, this version of Libertas is unarmed, a powerful, poised image of peace and hospitality. In the decades since the poem’s writing, including recent days, American “nativists” (so-called!) have sought to recast her as a guard keeping people out. But Lazarus’ poem stands as a ringing rebuke to this idea. This isn’t the old colossus, but rather a new one: far from keeping people out, Lady Liberty — that “mighty woman with a torch, whose flame / Is the imprisoned lightning” — is welcoming us in.

Happy Fourth, everyone!

The SALT Team