Chapter VI: Part 6

If you visit this statue, boys and girls, you will see at the base a bronze tablet with a short poem engraved upon it. The poem was written by a Jewish woman, Emma Lazarus, our first and greatest Jewish American poet. As a girl she had cared little for the history and traditions of her people; her verses were about the gods of Greece and Rome and the legends of the Middle Ages. Then, when the dreadful persecution of our people in Russia in 1881 drove many of them to our shores, she was called upon to assist in caring for some of the homeless wanderers and, like a loving mother, she gathered them to her heart.

Something new and beautiful awoke in her soul and she gave her strength and energy in caring for these exiles of her own blood. When she wrote now it was of her people. She read our long and wonderful history and immortalized the heroism of our martyrs in such poems as her tragedy, "The Dance to Death." She wrote shorter verses, too, and there are few Jewish boys and girls who have not recited or at least heard her stirring Chanukkah recitations, "The Feast of Lights," and "The Banner of the Jew." Her poems had always been very beautiful, winning the praises of such a high critic as Ralph Waldo Emerson, but now they glowed with a new beauty, her love and new found kinship with her race.

It was her passionate love for America and her knowledge of all that our country means to the Jew, both the native-born and the persecuted wanderer from other lands, that made her see in the Statue of Liberty more than a mere mass of sculptured stone. Instead she saw a gracious, loving woman guarding the gates of the New World, not like the ancient giant figure striding the harbor at Rhodes, a haughty menace to the nations, but a symbol of welcome and freedom and justice to all mankind. So she wrote her verses, to be inscribed later at the statue's base, telling as only a great poet could what America means to her children.

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!"

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| Typographical errors corrected in text: |
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| Page 31: her's replaced with hers |
| Page 58: earings replaced with earrings |
| Page 63: Pharoah replaced with Pharaoh |
| Page 71: 'For if your are discovered' replaced with |
| 'For if you are discovered' |
| Page 76: 'Your are to grow weaker' replaced with |
| 'You are to grow weaker' |
| Page 77: 'wrists and angles' replaced with |
| 'wrists and ankles' |
| Page 78: abuot replaced with about |
| Page 89: Hussiel replaced with Hushiel (twice) |
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| Page 92: hosts's replaced with hosts' |
| Page 93: persade replaced with persuade |
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| Page 119: earings replaced with earrings |
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| Page 144: wainted replaced with waited |
| Page 151: 'love like your's' replaced with |
| 'love like yours' |
| Page 152: 'Irving's eyes met her's' replaced with |
| 'Irving's eyes met hers' |
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| Note that the printers' error on page 32, which starts |
| with "Samuel's eyes sought the governor's face, half- he |
| told her, gently." has been left as is. Every copy of |
| the story consulted has the same error. |
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