Emma Lazarus

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• 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.
  • 1492

• Then Nature shaped a poet's heart — a lyre
  From out whose chords the lightest breeze that blows
  Drew trembling music.
  • Chopin, IV

• No man had ever heard a nightingale,
  When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred
  To study and define — what is a bird.
  • Critic and Poet: an Epilogue

• No signs of life are here: the very prayers
  Inscribed around are in a language dead.
  • In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport

• 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.
  • St Michael's Chapel

• Lo — a black line of birds in wavering thread
  Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!
  • The Cranes of Ibicus

• 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.
  • The New Colossus

• 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!
  • The New Colossus (1883)