Learn English with a Poem: “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

Hello, this is Gill at engVid, and we have a lesson today on a poem.

And you may have seen some of my poem videos before.

I'll give you more details of those at the end of the lesson if you haven't already

seen them, but people have asked for more poems.

So this video is in response to those requests.

So today's poem is quite a short poem.

It's quite a well-known one.

And I just need to get it up on the screen, first of all.

So let me just get my screen sharing working.

And here we are.

So I'm just giving you a few lines at a time so that you don't get distracted

by the whole thing all at once.

So this poem is called The New Colossus,

and it was written in 1883

by an American poet called Emma Lazarus.

And she was born in 1849.

And sadly, she didn't live a very long life.

She died in 1887 at the age of 38.

But this poem by her is one of probably her most famous one.

And I'm not going to tell you at the beginning what it's about.

I'd like you to try and guess as we go through the poem.

Okay, so I'm just going to read a few

lines at a time and just explain a little bit so that you can visualise what it is.

So she's describing something.

So it's something visual.

Okay, and just a little clue.

She was born in New York, so that might help you to work out what it is.

Okay, so here we go.

So the first two lines.

"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

with conquering limbs astride from land to land."

Okay, so that's a bit confusing to start a poem with "not".

A bit negative, you might think.

But she's describing something, the New Colossus, in fact.

But she's saying it's not like this other one, a Greek one, a Greek statue.

Actually, it was many centuries ago on the island of Rhodes or Rhodos,

to give it its Greek name.

So that statue isn't there anymore,

but there are pictures of it so you can see what it looks like.

So it's a statue of a man standing in the harbour.

Okay, so and "conquering limbs" sounds very sort of warlike and powerful.

"Standing

limbs astride", it's actually his legs are like this,

standing in the harbour of the island.

And "brazen",

if something is brazen, it's usually made of brass, the metal brass.

Okay, so it sounds very big and strong and powerful.

Okay, so whatever the New Colossus is, it's not like that statue.

So let's go on, we might be told in a minute what it is like.

So let's have a look.

So, "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."

So "here" meaning New York.

This is where she's born, she was born there, she lived there.

She's saying here at New York harbour,

"our sea-washed", the sea comes up to the coast,

up to the harbour.

"Sunset gates", there's a kind of poetic idea that,

and in reality too, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

In poetry, the sunrise is thought of as rising in the east

in places like Japan and China and setting in the west in places like America.

So the sunset gates, that's where they are, America, in the west.

So and the gates suggest this is where you come in.

You come into the city and into the country this way at the harbour gates.

So "shall stand", so this is in the future.

It's as if she's not there yet.

"Shall stand a mighty woman, a big woman with a torch",

something with flames coming from it, "whose flame is the imprisoned lightning",

which I think really that means electricity,

but electricity is perhaps not always a very poetic word.

So "imprisoned lightning" sounds much more poetic, I think.

And her name, "mother of exiles",

so exiles, people who have had to leave their own country.

"Refugees" is another word for that.

"Refugees".

"Mother of exiles".

OK, so you think, oh, OK.

Hmm, who's this?

So you're probably getting a very good idea now of what it's about.

But let's go on to the next bit.

So "from her beacon hand glows worldwide welcome.

Her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbour, that twin cities frame".

So her beacon hand, the torch that she's holding in her hand,

is like a beacon, a light shining out for people to see, and it glows.

There's a light coming from it.

And the idea is it's welcoming.

She is welcoming people to come, OK?

And "worldwide welcome".

It's almost like "worldwide web", but "worldwide welcome".

Three Ws, which you may know when you get

the same letter coming at the beginning of several words.

It's called alliteration, W, W, W,

or it could be with any other letter of the alphabet, usually consonants.

OK, "her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbour".

So New York is a harbour.

"That twin cities frame".

So twin cities is a bit confusing,

but at that time, New York and Brooklyn were separate cities.

I think they're now combined, but that's what she's talking about.

She wrote this poem in the early 1880s

when New York and Brooklyn were separate, but very close together.

OK, so let's carry on.

So now this is in quotation marks.

Oh, and just one thing I meant to mention.

You might just have noticed the word "harbour"

has a wiggly red line on my copy,

which is because my

setting for my word processing is for UK English.

You can probably see it here at the bottom, English, brackets, UK.

Some people have it set for American spelling.

So it's recognising the fact that the word "harbour"

is not the English UK way of spelling it.

So in the British English spelling, it would have a "u" in it.

Just like words like "colour" and "honour",

Americans don't include the letter "u" in the spelling.

So just to explain what that wiggly line is about.

OK, so let's move on.

So now this is in quotation marks, which means that the woman is speaking.

So what is she saying?

She says, "Keep, ancient lands, your storied palm," 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."

So I think this is referring back again to the statue mentioned at the beginning,

the statue that this one is not like, you know, this conquering,

very sort of powerful, probably male statue.

This is a female statue who is more maternal, a mother.

And welcoming, worldwide welcome.

And she's saying, never mind about all that, you know,

the ancient lands, meaning places like Europe with their kings and queens and so on.

You know, America saw itself as a modern

civilization who didn't need to have kings and queens.

So she says, "Keep your storied pomp," you know, meaning all your,

you know, aristocrats and your royalty and people like that.

You know, she's saying, we have a different way of life.

You know, bring the tired, poor people,

people who've had, maybe had really bad experiences in the country that they're

coming from, maybe persecution, lack of freedom just to be themselves,

yearning to breathe free,

the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

So a teeming shore means sort of lots of people.

So the idea is lots of people coming for a better life, really,

to New York and to America in general.

OK, and so we're still in the quotation bit here.

So "Send these,

the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

So the homeless people, people who couldn't live in their own

country for various, maybe political reasons,

just send them here.

I'll look after you. You're welcome here.

You can have a better life here.

It's that sort of idea. Homeless.

Tempest-tossed, again, we've got the red wiggly line.

Really, the main thing, I think, is the T-O-S-T, which is usually spelt like that.

It sort of means thrown about.

Usually the tempest is the storm.

If you're at sea on a ship

and there's a storm, you know the ship is going like this.

It's being thrown around.

And usually that's the T-O-S-T means that, thrown about in a storm.

So the people in those days, before aeroplanes, of course,

people had to travel there to New York and America by sea.

So they'd have a very long voyage to get

there and may be dangerous sometimes if there were storms.

So, you know, they've been rolling around on the sea for days and days or even weeks.

And,

you know, they're homeless, they're probably seasick, all of that.

But there she is with her lamp beside the golden door, the entrance to America.

The welcome.

So I guess probably by now you've realized what this is.

It's obviously a statue and, OK, I'll tell you,

it's the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.

But at the time she was writing, it hadn't yet arrived.

It was still being made in Paris, of all places.

It wasn't even made in America.

It was made in France by a French sculptor.

And which is why she uses the future tense, "shall stand a mighty woman".

She's not arrived yet, but they're expecting her.

I think they've probably seen some pictures of the statue.

They know what she's going to look like.

They know that she's holding a flaming torch

and that she symbolizes liberty.

So

she's writing this poem

to welcome the statue, really, before she's arrived.

OK, and so just to put that in a bit of context,

before I read the whole poem to you, as I said, Emma Lazarus was born in New York,

but she herself, like a lot of people in America, had come from other countries.

Not she herself, but her ancestors.

She had a Jewish ancestry

and in particular Portuguese, and her maybe great-grandfather,

great-grandmother, back in the 18th century, had been not in Portugal itself,

but they had been in Brazil

to escape persecution in Portugal as Jewish people.

They'd gone from Portugal to Brazil thinking they would be OK in Brazil,

but then the persecution kind of followed them in Brazil.

And so

from Brazil, her ancestors moved

into America

for a freer, safer life with no persecution.

So that was her background. And then at the time of this poem,

she was helping other refugees who were just arriving in New York,

mostly from Eastern Europe and from Russia, again,

Jewish people who were being persecuted in Russia mostly.

She was helping them to get established

in New York and get some training and better housing and so on.

So I think there's a lot of her own

interests there, her own family background, but also

the people that she's currently helping as well.

So you can imagine she cares very much about

taking care of people and giving them a better chance in life

and welcoming them and helping them.

So that's the background to it.

And of course, you know, these issues are still around today.

The idea of welcoming refugees or not welcoming them.

People have arguments.

It's a very controversial subject

about whether you can accept refugees in your country.

Maybe you have to put a limit to the numbers.

Different people have different opinions.

It's a very difficult issue.

So this poem is very relevant today in many countries, including America,

ironically, including America, where the Statue of Liberty stands,

supposedly welcoming people.

So, yeah, OK, so I think now

if I just read the whole poem out to you so that you can get the the full sort of

impact of it, and then I'll just show you a little bit

about the rhyme scheme, a few technical little things.

So here we are then.

Here's the whole poem.

So it's a sonnet in 14 lines, which is the usual length for a sonnet.

OK.

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 worldwide welcome.

Her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbour 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-tossed to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

So I usually get a lump in my throat at the end of that poem.

It happened again then.

It's very emotional at the end.

So, and you might also like to read a very good essay which I found recently

about this poem and about these very, you know,

controversial issues that are still going on today.

So it's the poetryfoundation.org.

So you might just like to pause the video so that you can write this URL down.

So that's it there.

It's a very good article about the complications of this subject

and the fact that it was controversial even at the time it was written,

the idea of whether to welcome people or not.

Not everybody was welcoming people with open arms, even in the 1880s.

But I think, you know, for Emma Lazarus,

this is a kind of emotional appeal and it's a standard to aim for,

a standard of humanity to aim for.

It's what she believed in.

OK, so let's just have a quick look,

just to give you a little bit of technical stuff about the rhyme scheme,

which if you've seen my video on a Shakespeare sonnet,

you'll have seen me do a similar thing there.

And what I'm going to do, I'm just going to highlight

in different colours

all the words that rhyme so that you can see the rhyme pattern.

So we've got 'fame', just looking at the last word in each line.

We need to look for the next word that rhymes with 'fame'.

So 'fame', 'land', no. 'Land' and'stand', they rhyme.

We'll come back to those.

We've got 'flame' here, so 'fame' and 'flame'.

OK, so they can all be yellow.

And then let's carry on. 'Name', that's another one.

'Name', 'hand', no. 'Hand', 'command', they rhyme.

Oh, and then we've got 'frame'.

So there's another yellow one.

Then we've got'she', 'for', 'free','short', 'need', 'door'.

So, OK, so the yellow ones, then,

the usual thing is to give a letter beginning with 'a',

as many letters as you need, depending on how many rhymes there are.

So, 'fame', 'flame', 'name', 'frame', they all rhyme.

OK, so what we need to do now is to do a different colour.

Let's have blue.

So we've got 'land' and'stand', they rhyme.

And then 'hand', 'land','stand', 'hand' and 'command'.

OK, so those rhyme. And then'she', 'for', 'free', 'none', 'none', 'none'.

OK, so there again, we have, if we call that 'b',

so the blue rhymes are 'b', 'land','stand', 'hand', 'command'.

OK, so we've done one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

We've done eight lines.

And traditionally in a sonnet, they do tend to divide up into eight lines

and then six, eight plus six, fourteen.

So this is the first eight lines.

They do tend to divide up like that.

And then we've got the final six lines with a different rhyme scheme.

So the rhyme scheme actually helps to

give a sense of the structure as well, a sort of two-part structure.

So'she', here's a new rhyme.

So let's go for pink, shall we?

So'she',

'free',

'me'.

So this time, the'she', 'free' and'me',

they're kind of alternating with something else.

It's slightly different than the first eight.

So, OK, so for this one, then, we call that 'c'.

OK, then, and then what's left?

We've got 'pore','shore' and 'door'.

OK, so we need another colour.

Let's go for green.

So 'pore',

'shore',

'door'.

And then we need to label that 'd'.

So there are just four different rhymes in the poem.

And the way you can describe it is 'abba', 'abba'.

So you actually type it like, or write it like that.

Looks like a pop group, doesn't it?

But never mind.

'abba', 'abba'.

And then we've got 'cd', 'cd', 'cd'.

So 'cd', 'cd', 'cd'.

And that's how you describe the rhyme scheme of a poem.

You just divide it up with the letters and it's a nice sort of short way

of describing the rhyme scheme, otherwise you'd take forever explaining

the pattern of it.

So I hope that's useful.

And I hope that using the colours helps to make it stand out even more.

If you have things like highlighter pens and you've got a poem printed out on paper,

that's a good way of doing it on paper with different coloured pens.

OK,

so, so that's just a little bit of technical stuff to do with poetry,

working out the rhyme, what's called the rhyme scheme.

OK.

And then just one other little point to make.

Sometimes the meaning of a line carries on to the next line.

So if you see punctuation at the ends of the lines, then it doesn't carry on.

But if you have something like

'here at our sea-washed sunset gate shall stand' - what?

'shall stand' what?'shall stand a mighty woman'.

So sometimes if you're reading it aloud,

you don't stop at the end of the line because the meaning carries on.

So sometimes when that happens, it gives a bit of variety in the poem.

So it's not always just broken up line by line.

That way, there's a bit of variety in it.

And also a bit later,

'from her beacon hand blows worldwide welcome,

and again cries she with silent lips'.

So that happens,

gives some variety

to the poem.

OK. And again, there's the link if you'd like to read the article.

OK, so I hope that's been an interesting lesson for you on a poem.

And as I said, I've made other poetry videos.

There's one on a Shakespeare sonnet, so that's also a 14-line poem.

There's a poem by Emily Dickinson,

which has been on for a while.

So you might like to have a look at that if you haven't already seen it.

There's one on a Japanese form of poetry called 'haiku'.

And then there's a sort of comic,

sort of children's one by Edward Lear called 'The Owl and the Pussycat'.

So you might just like to look at those.

And also another couple of videos on a sort of poetic language,

which is about metaphors and similes in two different lessons as well,

if you're interested in having a look at those.

OK, so I hope that's been a useful lesson.

And do subscribe to my channel if you haven't already.

And there we are.

Hope to see you again soon.

So, OK, bye for now. Bye.