Poetry in America with Elisa New (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 12 - The New Colossus - full transcript
"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus, featuring Regina Spector, Duy Doan, Randi Weingarten, David Rubenstein, and Cristina Jimenez.
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!"
When I asked recording
artist Regina Spektor
to discuss Emma Lazarus's
"The New Colossus" with me,
I was hopeful she'd say yes.
Regina had immigrated
with her family
from the USSR in 1989,
and I could tell from her lyrics
that Regina is a poet.
As it turned out,
Regina was eager to meet me
at the American Jewish
Historical Society,
where the original manuscript
of Lazarus's poem is held.
I also had a chance to talk
with David Rubenstein,
business leader
and philanthropist,
who purchases important
historical documents
and donates them
to public institutions;
with Randi Weingarten,
president of the
American Federation of Teachers;
with Cristina Jimenez,
who advocates for the rights
of the undocumented
young immigrants
called "Dreamers";
and with Duy Doan,
winner of the prestigious
Yale Younger Poets prize.
If we could begin talking
about the first eight lines
of the poem,
lines that are less familiar
to most readers.
Those last lines
everyone knows, right?
"Your huddled masses,
yearning to breathe free."
I always thought maybe that
was the only line on the plaque.
"Not like the brazen giant
of Greek fame,
with conquering limbs astride
from land to land."
It's interesting
to begin a poem with a "not"...
"Not."
But it's
this kind of comparison,
you know, of the New Colossus
to the Colossus of Rhodes,
and basically saying, "We're not
talking about Zeus here,
and we're not talking
about Rhodes here."
Even if you just look
at the main terms
that are associated
with the Colossus of Rhodes,
and then the New Colossus,
they're very different.
Brazen.
Greek fame.
Conquering.
It's very aggressive, male,
scary, imposing, you know,
Colossus protecting,
kind of almost
like a "fear this."
"Those who enter here,"
you know, "beware."
In the ancient days,
when you won a war,
you would take
the captured prisoners
and kind of march them
through the streets
to show who you had conquered
to your own citizens,
and sometimes
you would march them
in front of your major statues.
So she's saying,
"This is not something
"about a military conquest.
And we're not trying
to be a Greek, Greek hero."
It's a...
it's a new story, right?
She kind of pits us right away
against the, the ancient Greeks.
What the Greeks bring
to the table is power and fame.
What we have
is a little more complex.
The America as we know it
was established as a reaction.
It was a direct rejection
of something
that was happening in Europe,
and it wanted
to be a new kind of a thing,
so it's, like,
"not" is the first word.
And then, this next sextet
starts with,
"Keep, ancient lands,
your storied pomp."
You know, and it's, like,
it keeps saying no
to the way it was before,
and it wants to be
something different.
And with the,
this New Colossus...
"A mighty woman with a torch."
"Mother of Exiles."
"Mild eyes."
"Silent lips."
It's also a sense
in the imagery of welcoming.
"A mighty woman with a torch."
"Mild eyes."
There's just
something that is just...
nurturing.
What we have in our harbor is...
is benevolent, although mighty.
I love that she's mighty.
You know, and she's got
this flame that's lightning.
It could simply be
referring to the electricity
in the torch.
You know, this is around 1900,
so that's a
technological achievement.
You know, you already had
what was really happening
in terms of industrialization.
- Yeah.
Of the migration north.
Of the factories.
So it was
industrial muscularity.
And the power comes with peril,
too.
And the power of industry.
I mean, imprisoned lightning,
there's...
electricity.
Exactly, exactly.
- And electrification
that brings opportunity, right?
She's saying, "This is a country
that has, as its symbol,
"a woman holding a torch.
Don't think
there isn't power there."
It's power that's governed.
If you go back to the first line
and remember that she mentions
the ancient Greeks,
so maybe she's saying
that the Mother of Exiles
has captured Zeus's lightning.
"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."
"The air-bridged harbor
that twin cities frame."
I mean, she's referring
to the, the geography, right?
The actual landscape.
When you think
about those words,
you actually see the coast
of New York Harbor.
And I feel, like, you know,
such a proud New Yorker,
and being able to take the ferry
to Staten Island.
Yes. - And, you know,
pass through
the Statue of Liberty,
and being reminded
of these words.
But you actually see
"sea-washed sunset gates."
And when you think
about sunset in New York,
you see the sea kind of
both in its bellicosity
as well as in its serenity,
going up and down
the islands of Staten Island,
Long Island, and Manhattan.
It's a harbor,
which is a place of commerce,
and a place of welcome,
and you see America
as it's connected
to the rest of the world
by that sea.
You know, usually statues,
and sort of symbols of cities,
of countries,
they're placed on the land,
and they're in the confines
of that place.
She is forever an outsider,
just like the people
that she is welcoming.
Everybody's
some generation of an...
of an immigrant, or a stowaway,
or a refugee.
She is in exile, too.
She's an immigrant,
she came here from France,
and she is going
to stay in the harbor,
and never get so assimilated
that she forgets.
It is now assumed
that the Statue of Liberty
stands in New York Harbor
in order to welcome immigrants.
But it wasn't until 1903,
when the sonnet Lazarus had
written back in 1883
to raise money
for the statue's pedestal
was finally affixed there,
that the statue even began
to acquire this significance.
The Statue of Liberty,
which is so well-known
to everybody,
was, had nothing to do
with immigration.
It was really designed
to be a gift by the French
to the United States
to more or less thank them
for republican forms
of government.
There was an island
in the New York Harbor
they were going to put it on,
but they had to get a pedestal,
and an effort
to raise money for it,
and as part of that, there was
a, a kind of an auction
that was being put together.
She was asked, Emma Lazarus,
if she would write a poem
that might be auctioned off.
Emma Lazarus herself
was a person of very
comfortable circumstances
and upbringing,
who, in the early 1880s,
when Jews began
to flee Eastern Europe,
she heard
some sort of call herself.
Many Jews were leaving
Russia and Eastern Europe,
and they came to New York,
and they were put in tenements
and other kinds
of very unattractive places,
and she went down there,
and she kind of bonded
with them.
And she kind of saw
the terrible life
that people who had
the same religion that she had
were being treated.
And she began to volunteer
with the newly formed Hebrew...
...Emigrant Aid Society.
- Who brought me here.
My ancestors were part
of a group of people
who bought tickets,
they thought, to get them
to the United States.
But it was a scam, and they
only got to Leeds, England.
So they get there,
and there are 40,000 Jews
stuck in Leeds, England,
for quite a while
before they could
afford the money
to actually
get to the United States.
But the universality of it
is made possible
by the fact
she doesn't tell anybody
that the people coming in
are basically Jewish.
It was in the very decade
that Lazarus's poem
was placed on the pedestal
that the first great waves
of immigrants
from outside Northern Europe,
not only Jews, but Italians,
Czechs, Poles, and others
from all across Southern,
Central, and Eastern Europe
were arriving
in New York Harbor.
And it was precisely then
that the federal government
began regulating and restricting
their influx.
Beginning with the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,
new laws restricting immigration
were added in 1891,
1892, 1898,
and on into the new century.
These restrictions
would culminate
in the Immigration Act of 1924,
that capped numbers
of immigrants
and established national quotas.
This could be a poem
about Cuban immigrants. - Yes.
This could be a poem
about Haitian immigrants.
This could be a poem
about Southeastern European
immigrants.
Suppose she had written
a poem that said,
"We welcome Jewish people."
"We welcome the sons of Hebrew,
the daughters of,
and sons of Abraham."
You know, the poem
may not have had
the kind of universal appeal
that it later took on.
She doesn't say,
"Give me your tired, your poor
unless you're from this nation
or that nation."
She doesn't say, "Send these,
the homeless
"unless you're of this religion
or of that religion,
this race or that ethnicity."
What you see is
people who are trying
to find a different way
and are willing to go
through amazing odds
to cross a sea to get here.
"'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!'"
My parents were refugees
of the Vietnam War.
They were part
of the boat exodus in 1975.
My mother actually told me
that they could hear
the news on the radio
when the...
when the boat was
already on the water.
That was the official news
that Saigon had,
had been officially taken.
And I remember thinking,
"That's so solemn, so sad."
As immigrants
who came from Ecuador,
who were leaving a really
difficult economic situation...
We weren't homeless,
but I bet that if we would have
stayed in Ecuador for longer,
we could have ended there.
I come from
a long line of people
that were rejected
by their homeland.
My grandmother passed away,
and I found this, this poem
that her
and my grandfather's friend
had written.
The first part of the poem,
he's remembering
fighting in the war,
and the horrors
and the hunger and the cold
of World War II
and being on the front.
After that, he writes
about returning back home
after they were victorious
over the Nazis,
and being told
that all the Jews didn't fight.
They all went and hid,
and all their medals of honor
are bought and stolen
from the real fighters.
And this is how these people
were living in Soviet Union,
as these second-class citizens.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
"Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse
of your teeming shore."
What is it that makes
those lines...
so unforgettable?
It's beautiful, just the music.
"The huddled masses yearning
to breathe free,
the wretched refuse
of your teeming shore."
"The wretched refuse."
Wretched refuse.
Well, obviously,
it's a literary device.
The sounds alone...
"wretched refuse"... right?
That's... it's W-R,
but it's an R sound.
The emphasis falls
on the first syllable.
Mm-hmm.
- And it happens, as well,
with the second word, "refuse."
It's a repetition
of the sound, the beats,
"huddled masses,"
"wretched refuse."
"Huddled masses,"
"wretched refuse"...
They sit right on top...
- Right on top.
These phrases sit right
on top of each other...
Yeah...
- ...as if they're piled.
You see the images
of people hunched over,
you know,
huddling their families,
with whatever remnants
of luggage they have,
with clothes that look
like they've been unwashed
for days or weeks.
Yes. - That's...
That is the image that you see.
I was, I was born here.
I'll never know what it is
to yearn to breathe free.
And I remember seeing,
you know, kids on campus
with megaphones, you know,
on a lawn, you know,
yelling, you know,
"You think you're free
in this country?"
You know? And I just remembered
rolling my eyes
and thinking, like,
"You're saying
whatever you want,
"no one's going to come
and knock on your door at night
"and take you away.
"Your, your family history
isn't full of people
"being sent off to labor camps
because they made a joke
at a party."
Any kind of civil
or personal liberty
that I've ever felt might have
been violated or threatened
as a citizen of this country
is nothing in comparison
to the oppression
that they suffered
when they fled Vietnam.
That she used "tired" first.
Of all the things
that these people
had gone through,
that they were tired.
And it's, like, this,
obviously physical exhaustion,
but also just this...
you know, spiritual
and existential exhaustion
that they have just...
they're so tired from struggle.
What she is really doing is,
she's talking about the
importance of welcoming people,
and that's what, really, the key
message of the entire poem is.
That we want people,
we welcome people
who may not be
the wealthiest people,
the healthiest people,
the people who might bond
with our society most readily,
but these are the kind of people
that we should welcome,
and that's what the
Statue of Liberty is all about.
Basically, everybody
who's not wanted
is wanted here.
That's an incredible symbol
to have.
So many immigrants
share this story.
Others are escaping war.
Others are, um, like
my own parents and myself,
coming here to seek opportunity
and, and a better life
for themselves
and their families.
And as you read the poem,
you can also even feel...
the relief.
That many immigrants, um,
across generations
have felt when they got here.
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!"
That was such
a beautiful reading, Regina.
In fact, it wasn't a reading...
You, you memorized the poem.
This poem is a sonnet. - Yeah.
It begins
with an eight-line octet,
and then moves
to a six-line sestet,
which is a fixed,
traditional form.
What your reading did
was, um, combine
a warmth that sounded
very contemporary
with the elevation
and the grandeur
of this language,
you humanized...
You humanized the poem,
but you left... the grandeur.
You know, I come from...
from a culture
where poetry was recited
constantly throughout life.
In the Soviet Union,
everybody memorized poems,
and once you are using
your voice,
it's this in-between thing.
It's conversation,
but it's also elevated.
It just kind of vibrates
on a higher level.
I have to admit, I, I never...
I didn't really give this poem
much of a chance,
you know, for a long time.
I, I think it's probably
a case of the young poet
being too cool for school.
But then you look at
some of these beautiful lines.
"Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me."
Tempest-tost, that's so hard.
The stresses are heavier.
Yeah, she goes hard,
like, at the very end there,
"tempest-tost to me"
and then, very lightly,
"I lift my lamp
beside the golden door."
For me, the music
in that line's so understated,
even though
there's an exclamation point.
It's understated,
but then the...
the gesture of lifting
is, is triumphant.
The thing that I feel is
most skillful or powerful is
the torch,
the repetition of the torch.
The first time you see it is
in the fourth line,
the last time you see it
is in the final line.
"A mighty woman with a torch,
whose flame..."
So we know that there's a torch,
we know that there's a flame.
Maybe we can picture it,
I'm, I'm not quite sure.
And then, one line later,
"From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome."
So now we have a hand
and a glow.
So it's coming alive
a little bit.
But the image is still static,
right?
Nothing's, nothing's
really happening.
But when it comes back around
again to the final line,
"I lift my lamp
beside the golden door!"
Now there's movement and action.
It's not a static image anymore.
I once heard somebody say
that if you want
to forget about someone,
you build a statue of them
and put it in the town square.
And in that way, I, I wonder,
you know, if the...
the poem being written
on the pedestal
of a statue,
it probably
wouldn't have mattered.
I think
that it's the combination
of that it's this poem
and written on the pedestal
of that statue.
That it was this beloved
ever-powerful statue,
and so long as people
keep working towards
this golden door
actually being a golden door,
this place actually being worthy
of somebody striving towards it,
then she will
always have her power.
And she will always, you know,
be the mother
and the poem
will not be forgotten
and she will not be forgotten.
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!"
When I asked recording
artist Regina Spektor
to discuss Emma Lazarus's
"The New Colossus" with me,
I was hopeful she'd say yes.
Regina had immigrated
with her family
from the USSR in 1989,
and I could tell from her lyrics
that Regina is a poet.
As it turned out,
Regina was eager to meet me
at the American Jewish
Historical Society,
where the original manuscript
of Lazarus's poem is held.
I also had a chance to talk
with David Rubenstein,
business leader
and philanthropist,
who purchases important
historical documents
and donates them
to public institutions;
with Randi Weingarten,
president of the
American Federation of Teachers;
with Cristina Jimenez,
who advocates for the rights
of the undocumented
young immigrants
called "Dreamers";
and with Duy Doan,
winner of the prestigious
Yale Younger Poets prize.
If we could begin talking
about the first eight lines
of the poem,
lines that are less familiar
to most readers.
Those last lines
everyone knows, right?
"Your huddled masses,
yearning to breathe free."
I always thought maybe that
was the only line on the plaque.
"Not like the brazen giant
of Greek fame,
with conquering limbs astride
from land to land."
It's interesting
to begin a poem with a "not"...
"Not."
But it's
this kind of comparison,
you know, of the New Colossus
to the Colossus of Rhodes,
and basically saying, "We're not
talking about Zeus here,
and we're not talking
about Rhodes here."
Even if you just look
at the main terms
that are associated
with the Colossus of Rhodes,
and then the New Colossus,
they're very different.
Brazen.
Greek fame.
Conquering.
It's very aggressive, male,
scary, imposing, you know,
Colossus protecting,
kind of almost
like a "fear this."
"Those who enter here,"
you know, "beware."
In the ancient days,
when you won a war,
you would take
the captured prisoners
and kind of march them
through the streets
to show who you had conquered
to your own citizens,
and sometimes
you would march them
in front of your major statues.
So she's saying,
"This is not something
"about a military conquest.
And we're not trying
to be a Greek, Greek hero."
It's a...
it's a new story, right?
She kind of pits us right away
against the, the ancient Greeks.
What the Greeks bring
to the table is power and fame.
What we have
is a little more complex.
The America as we know it
was established as a reaction.
It was a direct rejection
of something
that was happening in Europe,
and it wanted
to be a new kind of a thing,
so it's, like,
"not" is the first word.
And then, this next sextet
starts with,
"Keep, ancient lands,
your storied pomp."
You know, and it's, like,
it keeps saying no
to the way it was before,
and it wants to be
something different.
And with the,
this New Colossus...
"A mighty woman with a torch."
"Mother of Exiles."
"Mild eyes."
"Silent lips."
It's also a sense
in the imagery of welcoming.
"A mighty woman with a torch."
"Mild eyes."
There's just
something that is just...
nurturing.
What we have in our harbor is...
is benevolent, although mighty.
I love that she's mighty.
You know, and she's got
this flame that's lightning.
It could simply be
referring to the electricity
in the torch.
You know, this is around 1900,
so that's a
technological achievement.
You know, you already had
what was really happening
in terms of industrialization.
- Yeah.
Of the migration north.
Of the factories.
So it was
industrial muscularity.
And the power comes with peril,
too.
And the power of industry.
I mean, imprisoned lightning,
there's...
electricity.
Exactly, exactly.
- And electrification
that brings opportunity, right?
She's saying, "This is a country
that has, as its symbol,
"a woman holding a torch.
Don't think
there isn't power there."
It's power that's governed.
If you go back to the first line
and remember that she mentions
the ancient Greeks,
so maybe she's saying
that the Mother of Exiles
has captured Zeus's lightning.
"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."
"The air-bridged harbor
that twin cities frame."
I mean, she's referring
to the, the geography, right?
The actual landscape.
When you think
about those words,
you actually see the coast
of New York Harbor.
And I feel, like, you know,
such a proud New Yorker,
and being able to take the ferry
to Staten Island.
Yes. - And, you know,
pass through
the Statue of Liberty,
and being reminded
of these words.
But you actually see
"sea-washed sunset gates."
And when you think
about sunset in New York,
you see the sea kind of
both in its bellicosity
as well as in its serenity,
going up and down
the islands of Staten Island,
Long Island, and Manhattan.
It's a harbor,
which is a place of commerce,
and a place of welcome,
and you see America
as it's connected
to the rest of the world
by that sea.
You know, usually statues,
and sort of symbols of cities,
of countries,
they're placed on the land,
and they're in the confines
of that place.
She is forever an outsider,
just like the people
that she is welcoming.
Everybody's
some generation of an...
of an immigrant, or a stowaway,
or a refugee.
She is in exile, too.
She's an immigrant,
she came here from France,
and she is going
to stay in the harbor,
and never get so assimilated
that she forgets.
It is now assumed
that the Statue of Liberty
stands in New York Harbor
in order to welcome immigrants.
But it wasn't until 1903,
when the sonnet Lazarus had
written back in 1883
to raise money
for the statue's pedestal
was finally affixed there,
that the statue even began
to acquire this significance.
The Statue of Liberty,
which is so well-known
to everybody,
was, had nothing to do
with immigration.
It was really designed
to be a gift by the French
to the United States
to more or less thank them
for republican forms
of government.
There was an island
in the New York Harbor
they were going to put it on,
but they had to get a pedestal,
and an effort
to raise money for it,
and as part of that, there was
a, a kind of an auction
that was being put together.
She was asked, Emma Lazarus,
if she would write a poem
that might be auctioned off.
Emma Lazarus herself
was a person of very
comfortable circumstances
and upbringing,
who, in the early 1880s,
when Jews began
to flee Eastern Europe,
she heard
some sort of call herself.
Many Jews were leaving
Russia and Eastern Europe,
and they came to New York,
and they were put in tenements
and other kinds
of very unattractive places,
and she went down there,
and she kind of bonded
with them.
And she kind of saw
the terrible life
that people who had
the same religion that she had
were being treated.
And she began to volunteer
with the newly formed Hebrew...
...Emigrant Aid Society.
- Who brought me here.
My ancestors were part
of a group of people
who bought tickets,
they thought, to get them
to the United States.
But it was a scam, and they
only got to Leeds, England.
So they get there,
and there are 40,000 Jews
stuck in Leeds, England,
for quite a while
before they could
afford the money
to actually
get to the United States.
But the universality of it
is made possible
by the fact
she doesn't tell anybody
that the people coming in
are basically Jewish.
It was in the very decade
that Lazarus's poem
was placed on the pedestal
that the first great waves
of immigrants
from outside Northern Europe,
not only Jews, but Italians,
Czechs, Poles, and others
from all across Southern,
Central, and Eastern Europe
were arriving
in New York Harbor.
And it was precisely then
that the federal government
began regulating and restricting
their influx.
Beginning with the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,
new laws restricting immigration
were added in 1891,
1892, 1898,
and on into the new century.
These restrictions
would culminate
in the Immigration Act of 1924,
that capped numbers
of immigrants
and established national quotas.
This could be a poem
about Cuban immigrants. - Yes.
This could be a poem
about Haitian immigrants.
This could be a poem
about Southeastern European
immigrants.
Suppose she had written
a poem that said,
"We welcome Jewish people."
"We welcome the sons of Hebrew,
the daughters of,
and sons of Abraham."
You know, the poem
may not have had
the kind of universal appeal
that it later took on.
She doesn't say,
"Give me your tired, your poor
unless you're from this nation
or that nation."
She doesn't say, "Send these,
the homeless
"unless you're of this religion
or of that religion,
this race or that ethnicity."
What you see is
people who are trying
to find a different way
and are willing to go
through amazing odds
to cross a sea to get here.
"'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!'"
My parents were refugees
of the Vietnam War.
They were part
of the boat exodus in 1975.
My mother actually told me
that they could hear
the news on the radio
when the...
when the boat was
already on the water.
That was the official news
that Saigon had,
had been officially taken.
And I remember thinking,
"That's so solemn, so sad."
As immigrants
who came from Ecuador,
who were leaving a really
difficult economic situation...
We weren't homeless,
but I bet that if we would have
stayed in Ecuador for longer,
we could have ended there.
I come from
a long line of people
that were rejected
by their homeland.
My grandmother passed away,
and I found this, this poem
that her
and my grandfather's friend
had written.
The first part of the poem,
he's remembering
fighting in the war,
and the horrors
and the hunger and the cold
of World War II
and being on the front.
After that, he writes
about returning back home
after they were victorious
over the Nazis,
and being told
that all the Jews didn't fight.
They all went and hid,
and all their medals of honor
are bought and stolen
from the real fighters.
And this is how these people
were living in Soviet Union,
as these second-class citizens.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
"Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse
of your teeming shore."
What is it that makes
those lines...
so unforgettable?
It's beautiful, just the music.
"The huddled masses yearning
to breathe free,
the wretched refuse
of your teeming shore."
"The wretched refuse."
Wretched refuse.
Well, obviously,
it's a literary device.
The sounds alone...
"wretched refuse"... right?
That's... it's W-R,
but it's an R sound.
The emphasis falls
on the first syllable.
Mm-hmm.
- And it happens, as well,
with the second word, "refuse."
It's a repetition
of the sound, the beats,
"huddled masses,"
"wretched refuse."
"Huddled masses,"
"wretched refuse"...
They sit right on top...
- Right on top.
These phrases sit right
on top of each other...
Yeah...
- ...as if they're piled.
You see the images
of people hunched over,
you know,
huddling their families,
with whatever remnants
of luggage they have,
with clothes that look
like they've been unwashed
for days or weeks.
Yes. - That's...
That is the image that you see.
I was, I was born here.
I'll never know what it is
to yearn to breathe free.
And I remember seeing,
you know, kids on campus
with megaphones, you know,
on a lawn, you know,
yelling, you know,
"You think you're free
in this country?"
You know? And I just remembered
rolling my eyes
and thinking, like,
"You're saying
whatever you want,
"no one's going to come
and knock on your door at night
"and take you away.
"Your, your family history
isn't full of people
"being sent off to labor camps
because they made a joke
at a party."
Any kind of civil
or personal liberty
that I've ever felt might have
been violated or threatened
as a citizen of this country
is nothing in comparison
to the oppression
that they suffered
when they fled Vietnam.
That she used "tired" first.
Of all the things
that these people
had gone through,
that they were tired.
And it's, like, this,
obviously physical exhaustion,
but also just this...
you know, spiritual
and existential exhaustion
that they have just...
they're so tired from struggle.
What she is really doing is,
she's talking about the
importance of welcoming people,
and that's what, really, the key
message of the entire poem is.
That we want people,
we welcome people
who may not be
the wealthiest people,
the healthiest people,
the people who might bond
with our society most readily,
but these are the kind of people
that we should welcome,
and that's what the
Statue of Liberty is all about.
Basically, everybody
who's not wanted
is wanted here.
That's an incredible symbol
to have.
So many immigrants
share this story.
Others are escaping war.
Others are, um, like
my own parents and myself,
coming here to seek opportunity
and, and a better life
for themselves
and their families.
And as you read the poem,
you can also even feel...
the relief.
That many immigrants, um,
across generations
have felt when they got here.
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!"
That was such
a beautiful reading, Regina.
In fact, it wasn't a reading...
You, you memorized the poem.
This poem is a sonnet. - Yeah.
It begins
with an eight-line octet,
and then moves
to a six-line sestet,
which is a fixed,
traditional form.
What your reading did
was, um, combine
a warmth that sounded
very contemporary
with the elevation
and the grandeur
of this language,
you humanized...
You humanized the poem,
but you left... the grandeur.
You know, I come from...
from a culture
where poetry was recited
constantly throughout life.
In the Soviet Union,
everybody memorized poems,
and once you are using
your voice,
it's this in-between thing.
It's conversation,
but it's also elevated.
It just kind of vibrates
on a higher level.
I have to admit, I, I never...
I didn't really give this poem
much of a chance,
you know, for a long time.
I, I think it's probably
a case of the young poet
being too cool for school.
But then you look at
some of these beautiful lines.
"Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tost to me."
Tempest-tost, that's so hard.
The stresses are heavier.
Yeah, she goes hard,
like, at the very end there,
"tempest-tost to me"
and then, very lightly,
"I lift my lamp
beside the golden door."
For me, the music
in that line's so understated,
even though
there's an exclamation point.
It's understated,
but then the...
the gesture of lifting
is, is triumphant.
The thing that I feel is
most skillful or powerful is
the torch,
the repetition of the torch.
The first time you see it is
in the fourth line,
the last time you see it
is in the final line.
"A mighty woman with a torch,
whose flame..."
So we know that there's a torch,
we know that there's a flame.
Maybe we can picture it,
I'm, I'm not quite sure.
And then, one line later,
"From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome."
So now we have a hand
and a glow.
So it's coming alive
a little bit.
But the image is still static,
right?
Nothing's, nothing's
really happening.
But when it comes back around
again to the final line,
"I lift my lamp
beside the golden door!"
Now there's movement and action.
It's not a static image anymore.
I once heard somebody say
that if you want
to forget about someone,
you build a statue of them
and put it in the town square.
And in that way, I, I wonder,
you know, if the...
the poem being written
on the pedestal
of a statue,
it probably
wouldn't have mattered.
I think
that it's the combination
of that it's this poem
and written on the pedestal
of that statue.
That it was this beloved
ever-powerful statue,
and so long as people
keep working towards
this golden door
actually being a golden door,
this place actually being worthy
of somebody striving towards it,
then she will
always have her power.
And she will always, you know,
be the mother
and the poem
will not be forgotten
and she will not be forgotten.