The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Vol.I, Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic
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Emma Lazarus >> The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Vol.I, Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic
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14 This etext was produced by Douglas E. Levy.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
"Sunrise" is an elegy to James A. Garfield, 20th President of
the United States, who died on September 19, 1881, from a gunshot
wound received in an assassination attempt in July of that year.
"The New Colossus" is engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
THE POEMS of EMMA LAZARUS
in Two Volumes
VOL. I.
Narrative, Lyric, and dramatic
CONTENTS.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF EMMA LAZARUS.
EPOCHS.--
I. Youth.
II. Regret.
III. Longing.
IV. Storm.
V. Surprise.
VI. Grief.
VII. Acceptance.
VIII. Loneliness.
IX. Sympathy.
X. Patience.
XI. Hope.
XII. Compensation.
XIII. Faith.
XIV. Work.
XV. Victory.
XVI. Peace.
HOW LONG!
HEROES.
ADMETUS.
TANNHAUSER.
LINKS.
MATINS.
SAINT ROMUALDO.
AFTERNOON.
PHANTASIES.--
I. Evening.
II. Aspiration.
III. Wherefore?
IV. Fancies.
V. In the Night.
VI. Faerie.
VII. Confused Dreams.
ON THE PROPOSAL TO ERECT A MONUMENT IN ENGLAND TO LORD BYRON.
ARABESQUE.
AGAMEMNON'S TOMB.
SIC SEMPER LIBERATORIBUS.
DON RAFAEL.
OFF ROUGH POINT
MATER AMABILIS.
FOG.
THE ELIXIR.
SONG.
SPRING LONGING.
Spring Longing.
THE SOUTH.
SPRING STAR.
A JUNE NIGHT.
MAGNETISM
AUGUST MOON.
SUNRISE.
A MASQUE OF VENICE.
AUTUMN SADNESS.
SONNETS.
Echoes.
Success.
The New Colossus.
Chopin I., II., III., IV.
Symphonic Studies Prelude, I., II., III., IV., V., VI.,
Epilogue.
Long Island Sound.
Destiny.
1879.
From one Augur to Another.
The Cranes of Ibycus.
Critic and Poet.
St. Michael's Chapel.
Life and Art.
Sympathy.
Youth and Death.
Age and Death.
City Visions.
Influence.
Restlessness.
THE SPAGNOLETTO: A Play in Five Acts.
Publisher's note: Thanks are due to the Editors of "The Century,"
Lippincott's Magazine, and "The Critic," for their courtesy in
allowing the poems published by them to be reprinted in these
pages.
EMMA LAZARUS. (Written for "The Century Magazine")
Born July 22, 1849; Died November 19, 1887.
One hesitates to lift the veil and throw the light upon a life so
hidden and a personality so withdrawn as that of Emma Lazarus; but
while her memory is fresh, and the echo of her songs still lingers
in these pages, we feel it a duty to call up her presence once more,
and to note the traits that made it remarkable and worthy to shine
out clearly before the world. Of dramatic episode or climax in her
life there is none; outwardly all was placid and serene, like an
untroubled stream whose depths alone hold the strong, quick tide.
The story of her life is the story of a mind, of a spirit, ever
seeking, ever striving, and pressing onward and upward to new truth
and light. Her works are the mirror of this progress. In reviewing
them, the first point that strikes us is the precocity, or rather
the spontaneity, of her poetic gift. She was a born singer; poetry
was her natural language, and to write was less effort than to speak,
for she was a shy, sensitive child, with strange reserves and
reticences, not easily putting herself "en rapport" with those around
her. Books were her world from her earliest years; in them she
literally lost and found herself. She was eleven years old when the
War of Succession broke out, which inspired her first lyric outbursts.
Her poems and translations written between the ages of fourteen and
seventeen were collected, and constituted her first published volume.
Crude and immature as these productions naturally were, and utterly
condemned by the writer's later judgment, they are, nevertheless,
highly interesting and characteristic, giving, as they do, the
keynote of much that afterwards unfolded itself in her life. One
cannot fail to be rather painfully impressed by the profound
melancholy pervading the book. The opening poem is "In Memoriam,"--
on the death of a school friend and companion; and the two following
poems also have death for theme. "On a Lock of my Mother's Hair"
gives
us reflections on growing old. These are the four poems written at
the age of fourteen. There is not a wholly glad and joyous strain in
the volume, and we might smile at the recurrence of broken vows,
broken hearts, and broken lives in the experience of this maiden just
entered upon her teens, were it not that the innocent child herself
is in such deadly earnest. The two long narrative poems, "Bertha" and
"Elfrida," are tragic in the extreme. Both are dashed off apparently
at white heat: "Elfrida," over fifteen hundred lines of blank verse,
in two weeks; "Bertha," in three and a half. We have said that Emma
Lazarus was a born singer, but she did not sing, like a bird, for
joy of being alive; and of being young, alas! there is no hint in
these youthful effusions, except inasmuch as this unrelieved gloom,
this ignorance of "values," so to speak, is a sign of youth, common
especially among gifted persons of acute and premature sensibilities,
whose imagination, not yet focused by reality, overreached the mark.
With Emma Lazarus, however, this sombre streak has a deeper root;
something of birth and temperament is in it--the stamp and heritage
of a race born to suffer. But dominant and fundamental though it was,
Hebraism was only latent thus far. It was classic and romantic art
that first attracted and inspired her. She pictures Aphrodite the
beautiful, arising from the waves, and the beautiful Apollo and his
loves,--Daphne, pursued by the god, changing into the laurel, and the
enamored Clytie into the faithful sunflower. Beauty, for its own
sake, supreme and unconditional, charmed her primarily and to the end.
Her restless spirit found repose in the pagan idea,--the absolute
unity and identity of man with nature, as symbolized in the Greek
myths, where every natural force becomes a person, and where, in turn,
persons pass with equal readiness and freedom back into nature again.
In this connection a name would suggest itself even if it did not
appear,--Heine, the Greek, Heine the Jew, Heine the Romanticist, as
Emma Lazarus herself has styled him; and already in this early volume
of hers we have trace of the kinship and affinity that afterwards so
plainly declared itself. Foremost among the translations are a
number of his songs, rendered with a finesse and a literalness that
are rarely combined. Four years later, at the age of twenty-one,
she published her second volume, "Admetus and Other Poems," which
at once took rank as literature both in America and England, and
challenged comparison with the work of established writers. Of
classic themes we have "Admetus" and "Orpheus," and of romantic the
legend of Tannhauser and of the saintly Lohengrin. All are treated
with an artistic finish that shows perfect mastery of her craft,
without detracting from the freshness and flow of her inspiration.
While sounding no absolutely new note in the world, she yet makes
us aware of a talent of unusual distinction, and a highly endowed
nature,--a sort of tact of sentiment and expression, an instinct
of the true and beautiful, and that quick intuition which is like
second-sight in its sensitiveness to apprehend and respond to external
stimulus. But it is not the purely imaginative poems in this volume
that most deeply interest us. We come upon experience of life in
these pages; not in the ordinary sense, however, of outward activity
and movement, but in the hidden undercurrent of being. "The epochs
of our life are not in the visible facts, but in the silent thoughts
by the wayside as we walk." This is the motto, drawn from Emerson,
which she chooses for her poem of "Epochs," which marks a pivotal
moment in her life. Difficult to analyze, difficult above all to
convey, if we would not encroach upon the domain of private and
personal experience, is the drift of this poem, or rather cycle of
poems, that ring throughout with a deeper accent and a more direct
appeal than has yet made itself felt. It is the drama of the human
soul,--"the mystic winged and flickering butterfly," "flitting
between earth and sky," in its passage from birth to death.
A golden morning of June! "Sweet empty sky without a stain."
Sunlight and mist and "ripple of rain-fed rills." "A murmur and a
singing manifold."
"What simple things be these the soul to raise
To bounding joy, and make young pulses beat
With nameless pleasure, finding life so sweet!"
Such is youth, a June day, fair and fresh and tender with dreams and
longing and vague desire. The morn lingers and passes, but the noon
has not reached its height before the clouds begin to rise, the
sunshine dies, the air grows thick and heavy, the lightnings flash,
the thunder breaks among the hills, rolls and gathers and grows,
until
Behold, yon bolt struck home,
And over ruined fields the storm hath come."
Now we have the phases of the soul,--the shock and surprise of grief
in the face of the world made desolate. Loneliness and despair for
a space, and then, like stars in the night, the new births of the
spirit, the wonderful outcoming from sorrow: the mild light of
patience
at first; hope and faith kindled afresh in the very jaws of evil;
the new meaning and worth of life beyond sorrow, beyond joy; and
finally duty, the holiest word of all, that leads at last to victory
and peace. The poem rounds and completes itself with the close of
"the long, rich day," and the release of
"The mystic winged and flickering butterfly,
A human soul, that drifts at liberty,
Ah! who can tell to what strange paradise,
To what undreamed-of fields and lofty skies!"
We have dwelt at some length upon this poem, which seems to us, in a
certain sense, subjective and biographical; but upon closer analysis
there is still another conclusion to arrive at. In "Epochs" we have,
doubtless, the impress of a calamity brought very near to the writer,
and profoundly working upon her sensibilities; not however by direct,
but reflex action, as it were, and through sympathetic emotion--the
emotion of the deeply-stirred spectator, of the artist, the poet who
lives in the lives of others, and makes their joys and their sorrows
his own.
Before dismissing this volume we may point out another clue as to the
shaping of mind and character. The poem of "Admetus" is dedicated
"to my friend Ralph Waldo Emerson." Emma Lazarus was between
seventeen and eighteen years of age when the writings of Emerson
fell into her hands, and it would be difficult to over-estimate the
impression produced upon her. As she afterwards wrote: "To how many
thousand youthful hearts has not his word been the beacon--nay,
more, the guiding star--that led them safely through periods of
mental storm and struggle!" Of no one is this more true than herself.
Left, to a certain extent, without compass or guide, without any
positive or effective religious training, this was the first great
moral revelation of her life. We can easily realize the chaos and
ferment of an over-stimulated brain, steeped in romantic literature,
and given over to the wayward leadings of the imagination. Who can
tell what is true, what is false, in a world where fantasy is as real
as fact? Emerson's word fell like truth itself, "a shaft of light
shot from the zenith," a golden rule of thought and action. His
books were bread and wine to her, and she absorbed them into her
very being. She felt herself invincibly drawn to the master, "that
fount of wisdom and goodness," and it was her great privilege during
these years to be brought into personal relations with him. From
the first he showed her a marked interest and sympathy, which became
for her one of the most valued possessions of her life. He criticised
her work with the fine appreciation and discrimination that made
him quick to discern the quality of her talent as well as of her
personality, and he was no doubt attracted by her almost transparent
sincerity and singleness of soul, as well as by the simplicity and
modesty that would have been unusual even in a person not gifted.
He constituted himself, in a way, her literary mentor, advised her
as to the books she should read and the attitude of mind she should
cultivate. For some years he corresponded with her very faithfully;
his letters are full of noble and characteristic utterances, and
give evidence of a warm regard that in itself was a stimulus and a
high incentive. But encouragement even from so illustrious a source
failed to elate the young poetess, or even to give her a due sense
of the importance and value of her work, or the dignity of her
vocation. We have already alluded to her modesty in her unwillingness
to assert herself or claim any prerogative,--something even morbid
and exaggerated, which we know not how to define, whether as over-
sensitiveness or indifference. Once finished, the heat and glow of
composition spent, her writings apparently ceased to interest her.
She often resented any allusion to them on the part of intimate
friends, and the public verdict as to their excellence could not
reassure or satisfy her. The explanation is not far, perhaps, to
seek. Was it not the "Ewig-Weibliche" that allows no prestige but
its own? Emma Lazarus was a true woman, too distinctly feminine to
wish to be exceptional, or to stand alone and apart, even by virtue
of superiority.
A word now as to her life and surroundings. She was one of a family
of seven, and her parents were both living. Her winters were passed
in New York, and her summers by the sea. In both places her life was
essentially quiet and retired. The success of her book had been
mainly in the world of letters. In no wise tricked out to catch the
public eye, her writings had not yet made her a conspicuous figure,
but were destined slowly to take their proper place and give her the
rank that she afterwards held.
For some years now almost everything that she wrote was published
in "Lippincott's Magazine," then edited by John Foster Kirk, and we
shall still find in her poems the method and movement of her life.
Nature is still the fount and mirror, reflecting, and again reflected,
in the soul. We have picture after picture, almost to satiety,
until we grow conscious of a lack of substance and body and of vital
play to the thought, as though the brain were spending itself in
dreamings and reverie, the heart feeding upon itself, and the life
choked by its own fullness without due outlet. Happily, however,
the heavy cloud of sadness has lifted, and we feel the subsidence
of waves after a storm. She sings "Matins:"--
"Does not the morn break thus,
Swift, bright, victorious,
With new skies cleared for us
Over the soul storm-tost?
Her night was long and deep,
Strange visions vexed her sleep,
Strange sorrows bade her weep,
Her faith in dawn was lost.
"No halt, no rest for her,
The immortal wanderer
From sphere to higher sphere
Toward the pure source of day.
The new light shames her fears,
Her faithlessness and tears,
As the new sun appears
To light her god-like way."
Nature is the perpetual resource and consolation. "'T is good to be
alive!" she says, and why? Simply,
"To see the light
That plays upon the grass, to feel (and sigh
With perfect pleasure) the mild breeze stir
Among the garden roses, red and white,
With whiffs of fragrancy."
She gives us the breath of the pines and of the cool, salt seas,
"illimitably sparkling." Her ears drink the ripple of the tide,
and she stops
"To gaze as one who is not satisfied
With gazing at the large, bright, breathing sea."
"Phantasies" (after Robert Schumann) is the most complete and perfect
poem of this period. Like "Epochs," it is a cycle of poems, and the
verse has caught the very trick of music,--alluring, baffling, and
evasive. This time we have the landscape of the night, the glamour
of moon and stars,--pictures half real and half unreal, mystic
imaginings, fancies, dreams, and the enchantment of "faerie," and
throughout the unanswered cry, the eternal "Wherefore" of destiny.
Dawn ends the song with a fine clear note, the return of day, night's
misty phantoms rolled away, and the world itself, again green,
sparkling and breathing freshness.
In 1874 she published "Alide," a romance in prose drawn from Goethe's
autobiography. It may be of interest to quote the letter she
received from Tourgeneff on this occasion:--
"Although, generally speaking, I do not think it advisable
to take celebrated men, especially poets and artists, as a
subject for a novel, still I am truly glad to say that I
have read your book with the liveliest interest. It is
very sincere and very poetical at the same time; the life
and spirit of Germany have no secrets for you, and your
characters are drawn with a pencil as delicate as it is
strong. I feel very proud of the approbation you give to
my works, and of the influence you kindly attribute to them
on your own talent; an author who write as you do is not
a pupil in art any more; he is not far from being himself
a master."
Charming and graceful words, of which the young writer was justly
proud.
About this time occurred the death of her mother, the first break in
the home and family circle. In August of 1876 she made a visit to
Concord, at the Emersons', memorable enough for her to keep a journal
and note down every incident and detail. Very touching to read now,
in its almost childlike simplicity, is this record of "persons that
pass and shadows that remain." Mr. Emerson himself meets her at the
station, and drives with her in his little one-horse wagon to his
home, the gray square house, with dark green blinds, set amidst noble
trees. A glimpse of the family,--"the stately, white-haired Mrs.
Emerson, and the beautiful, faithful Ellen, whose figure seems always
to stand by the side of her august father." Then the picture of
Concord itself, lovely and smiling, with its quiet meadows, quiet
slopes, and quietest of rivers. She meets the little set of Concord
people: Mr. Alcott, for whom she does not share Mr. Emerson's
enthusiasm; and William Ellery Channing, whose figure stands out like
a gnarled and twisted scrub-oak,--a pathetic, impossible creature,
whose cranks and oddities were submitted to on account of an innate
nobility of character. "Generally crabbed and reticent with
strangers, he took a liking to me," says Emma Lazarus. "The bond
of our sympathy was my admiration for Thoreau, whose memory he
actually worships, having been his constant companion in his best
days, and his daily attendant in the last years of illness and heroic
suffering. I do not know whether I was most touched by the thought
of the unique, lofty character that had inspired this depth and
fervor of friendship, or by the pathetic constancy and pure affection
of the poor, desolate old man before me, who tried to conceal his
tenderness and sense of irremediable loss by a show of gruffness and
philosophy. He never speaks of Thoreau's death," she says, "but
always 'Thoreau's loss,' or 'when I lost Mr. Thoreau,' or 'when Mr.
Thoreau went away from Concord;' nor would he confess that he missed
him, for there was not a day, an hour, a moment, when he did not
feel that his friend was still with him and had never left him. And
yet a day or two after," she goes on to say, "when I sat with him in
the sunlit wood, looking at the gorgeous blue and silver summer sky,
he turned to me and said: 'Just half of the world died for me when I
lost Mr. Thoreau. None of it looks the same as when I looked at it
with him.'. . . He took me through the woods and pointed out to me
every spot visited and described by his friend. Where the hut stood
is a little pile of stones, and a sign, 'Site of Thoreau's Hut,' and
a few steps beyond is the pond with thickly-wooded shore,--everything
exquisitely peaceful and beautiful in the afternoon light, and not
a sound to be heard except the crickets or the 'z-ing' of the locusts
which Thoreau has described. Farther on he pointed out to me, in
the distant landscape, a low roof, the only one visible, which was
the roof of Thoreau's birthplace. He had been over there many times,
he said, since he lost Mr. Thoreau, but had never gone in,--he was
afraid it might look lonely! But he had often sat on a rock in
front of the house and looked at it." On parting from his young
friend, Mr. Channing gave her a package, which proved to be a copy
of his own book on Thoreau, and the pocket compass which Thoreau
carried to the Maine woods and on all his excursions. Before leaving
the Emersons she received the proof-sheets of her drama of "The
Spagnoletto," which was being printed for private circulation. She
showed them to Mr. Emerson, who had expressed a wish to see them,
and, after reading them, he gave them back to her with the comment
that they were "good." She playfully asked him if he would not give
her a bigger word to take home to the family. He laughed, and said
he did not know of any; but he went on to tell her that he had
taken it up, not expecting to read it through, and had not been able
to put it down. Every word and line told of richness in the poetry,
he said, and as far as he could judge the play had great dramatic
opportunities. Early in the autumn "The Spagnoletto" appeared,--a
tragedy in five acts, the scene laid in Italy, 1655.
Without a doubt, every one in these days will take up with misgiving,
and like Mr. Emerson "not expecting to read it through," a five-act
tragedy of the seventeenth century, so far removed apparently from
the age and present actualities,--so opposed to the "Modernite,"
which has come to be the last word of art. Moreover, great names at
once appear; great shades arise to rebuke the presumptuous new-comer
in this highest realm of expression. "The Spagnoletto" has grave
defects that would probably preclude its ever being represented on
the stage. The denoument especially is unfortunate, and sins against
our moral and aesthetic instinct. The wretched, tiger-like father
stabs himself in the presence of his crushed and erring daughter, so
that she may forever be haunted by the horror and the retribution of
his death. We are left suspended, as it were, over an abyss, our
moral judgment thwarted, our humanity outraged. But "The Spagnoletto"
is, nevertheless, a remarkable production, and pitched in another
key from anything the writer has yet given us. Heretofore we have
only had quiet, reflective, passive emotion: now we have a storm
and sweep of passion for which we were quite unprepared. Ribera's
character is charged like a thunder-cloud with dramatic elements.
Maria Rosa is the child of her father, fired at a flash, "deaf, dumb,
and blind" at the touch of passion.
"Does love steal gently o'er our soul?"
she asks;
"What if he come,
A cloud, a fire, a whirlwind?"
and then the cry:
"O my God!
This awful joy in mine own heart is love."
Again:
"While you are here the one thing real to me
In all the universe is love."
Exquisitely tender and refined are the love scenes--at the ball and
in the garden--between the dashing prince-lover in search of his
pleasure and the devoted girl with her heart in her eyes, on her
lips, in her hand. Behind them, always like a tragic fate, the
somber figure of the Spagnoletto, and over all the glow and color
and soul of Italy.
In 1881 appeared the translation of Heine's poems and ballads, which
was generally accepted as the best version of that untranslatable
poet. Very curious is the link between that bitter, mocking, cynic
spirit and the refined, gentle spirit of Emma Lazarus. Charmed by
the magic of his verse, the iridescent play of his fancy, and the
sudden cry of the heart piercing through it all, she is as yet unaware
or only vaguely conscious of the of the real bond between them: the
sympathy in the blood, the deep, tragic, Judaic passion of eighteen
hundred years that was smouldering in her own heart, soon to break
out and change the whole current of thought and feeling.
Already, in 1879, the storm was gathering. In a distant province
of Russia at first, then on the banks of the Volga, and finally in
Moscow itself, the old cry was raised, the hideous mediaeval charge
revived, and the standard of persecution unfurled against the Jews.
Province after province took it up. In Bulgaria, Servia, and, above
all, Roumania, where, we were told, the sword of the Czar had been
drawn to protect the oppressed, Christian atrocities took the place
of Moslem atrocities, and history turned a page backward into the dark
annals of violence and crime. And not alone in despotic Russia, but
in Germany, the seat of modern philosophic thought and culture, the
rage of Anti-Semitism broke out and spread with fatal ease and
potency.
In Berlin itself tumults and riots were threatened. We in America
could scarcely comprehend the situation or credit the reports, and
for a while we shut our eyes and ears to the facts; but we were soon
rudely awakened from our insensibility, and forced to face the truth.
It was in England that the voice was first raised in behalf of
justice and humanity. In January, 1881, there appeared in the
"London Times" a series of articles, carefully compiled on the
testimony of eye-witnesses, and confirmed by official documents,
records, etc., giving an account of events that had been taking place
in southern and western Russia during a period of nine months,
between April and December of 1880. We do not need to recall the
sickening details. The headings will suffice: outrage, murder, arson,
and pillage, and the result,--100,000 Jewish families made homeless
and destitute, and nearly $100,000,000 worth of property destroyed.
Nor need we recall the generous outburst of sympathy and indignation
from America. "It is not that it is the oppression of Jews by
Russia," said Mr. Evarts in the meeting at Chickering Hall Wednesday
evening, February 4; "it is that it is the oppression of men and
women, and we are men and women." So spoke civilized Christendom,
and for Judaism,-- who can describe that thrill of brotherhood,
quickened anew, the immortal pledge of the race, made one again
through sorrow? For Emma Lazarus it was a trumpet call that awoke
slumbering and unguessed echoes. All this time she had been seeking
heroic ideals in alien stock, soulless and far removed; in pagan
mythology and mystic, mediaeval Christianity, ignoring her very
birthright,--the majestic vista of the past, down which, "high above
flood and fire," had been conveyed the precious scroll of the Moral
Law. Hitherto Judaism had been a dead letter to her. Of Portuguese
descent, her family had always been members of the oldest and most
orthodox congregation of New York, where strict adherence to custom
and ceremonial was the watchword of faith; but it was only during
her childhood and earliest years that she attended the synagogue,
and conformed to the prescribed rites and usages which she had now
long since abandoned as obsolete and having no bearing on modern
life. Nor had she any great enthusiasm for her own people. As late
as April, 1882, she published in "The Century Magazine" an article
written probably some months before, entitled "Was the Earl of
Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?" in which she is disposed to
accept as the type of the modern Jew the brilliant, successful, but
not over-scrupulous chevalier d'industrie. In view of subsequent,
or rather contemporaneous events, the closing paragraph of the article
in question is worthy of being cited:--
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