Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) gained lasting fame as the author of the sonnet “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. She is noteworthy also as one of the first writers to explore the Jewish experience in America. “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport” constitutes the 18-year-old Lazarus’s response to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport” had been occasioned by a visit to Rhode Island’s Touro synagogue, the oldest in America, then closed. Longfellow’s poem, though clearly the more accomplished work, ends by asserting that “dead nations never rise again.” Adopting Longfellow’s pentameter quatrains, though not his abab rhyme scheme, Lazarus shifts the focus to the “burning bush” of living prayer and worship that the synagogue itself, even in its unused state, suggests. 

In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport 
by Emma Lazarus 

Here, where the noises of the busy town,
   The ocean’s plunge and roar can enter not,
We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
   And muse upon the consecrated spot.

No signs of life are here: the very prayers
   Inscribed around are in a language dead;
The light of the “perpetual lamp” is spent
   That an undying radiance was to shed.

What prayers were in this temple offered up,
   Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
   From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!

How as we gaze, in this new world of light,
   Upon this relic of the days of old,
The present vanishes, and tropic bloom
   And Eastern towns and temples we behold.

Again we see the patriarch with his flocks,
   The purple seas, the hot blue sky o’erhead,
The slaves of Egypt,—omens, mysteries,—
   Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.

A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,
   A man who reads Jehovah’s written law,
’Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare,
   Unto a people prone with reverent awe.

The pride of luxury’s barbaric pomp,
   In the rich court of royal Solomon—
Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains,—
   The exiles by the streams of Babylon.

Our softened voices send us back again
   But mournful echoes through the empty hall:
Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound,
   And with unwonted gentleness they fall.

The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,
   All found their comfort in the holy place,
And children’s gladness and men’s gratitude
   ’Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.

The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
   We know not which is sadder to recall;
For youth and happiness have followed age,
   And green grass lieth gently over all.

Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,
   With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.
Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,
   Before the mystery of death and God.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of a North Carolina poet, Sally Thomas. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.