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
I Lift My Lamp
Topic: Justice, Vision, & Leadership
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 (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American poet, writer, and translator from New York City. She wrote the sonnet The New Colossus in 1883, which includes "lines of world-wide welcome". Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, installed in 1903, a decade and a half after Lazarus's death. The last stanza of the sonnet was set to music by Irving Berlin as the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World).
The New Colossus
Wilson, Andrew, editor. World Scripture II. Universal Peace Federation, 2011, p. 1054 [Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus].
Emma Lazarus
Theme: A Vision of America
About This Emma Lazarus Quotation [Commentary]
Emma Lazarus begins by saying what Liberty is “Not like”: not the “brazen giant of Greek fame / With conquering limbs astride from land to land,” but “A mighty woman with a torch,” “Mother of Exiles.” In this order, strength is redirected into care: “the imprisoned lightning” serves guidance, and “her mild eyes command / The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.” Authority is present, but oriented toward those who arrive. This is A Vision of America grounded in welcome rather than display.
The turn comes with the public refusal—“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!”—followed by the direct summons: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The catalogue is exact: “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.” The lines neither soften hardship nor deny dignity. Spoken by a woman figure to all genders, the appeal is universal and concrete.
The close is action and place: “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”—the lamp lifted, the door near. “Mother of Exiles” asks the nation to stand at the threshold, prefer people over “storied pomp,” and turn power into welcome. In our time, A Vision of America faithful to this sequence would keep the lamp lifted and answer the plain imperative at the poem’s heart: “Give me your…masses yearning to breathe free.”
Ken Burns Video on the Statue of Liberty & Emma Lazarus’s Poem
This poem (excerpt), from the “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus (1883) is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, which has stood in New York harbor and welcomed millions of immigrants to America.
When boats enter the New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty is immediately visible. For those fleeing persecution during the years before, during, and after the Holocaust, this American symbol of freedom represented the promise of safety and a better life. A bronze plaque at the base of the statue confirms that hope with the words of Jewish-American Emma Lazarus. Her poem, “The New Colossus,” welcomes the “tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” However, a second poem by Thomas Aldridge, “Unguarded Gates” was equally known during the same time and complicates this message of unconditional welcome.
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