Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor

In 1883 the Statue of Liberty was still in pieces in a Paris workshop and New York had not raised the money for its pedestal. An art auction was organized to help. Emma Lazarus, a thirty-four-year-old poet from an old Sephardic New York family, was asked to contribute a sonnet.

She had spent the previous two years working with Jewish refugees arriving from the pogroms in Russia, and she wrote the statue as she saw it — not a warning to the Old World but a "Mother of Exiles" holding a lamp "beside the golden door." She called the poem "The New Colossus."

Lazarus died in 1887 at thirty-eight and never saw the words on the statue. A friend had them cast in bronze and mounted inside the pedestal in 1903.

Liberty stands at the right edge in a single navy, cropped so the torch nearly touches the top of the sheet and the pedestal runs off the bottom. The crown's rays, the folds of the robe, the tablet, the balcony rail and the pedestal windows are all there in white cut-outs. Down the left side the lines stack in red serif capitals, six lines ragged right, the type stepping down in size as it goes. The statue looks past the words. The words are for the reader.