Yearning to Breathe Free
The poem on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor is a sonnet titled “The New Colossus,” written by American poet Emma Lazarus in 1883. Its famous lines, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” transformed the statue from a monument of generic liberty into a worldwide symbol of immigration, refuge, and hope.
Lady Liberty was the first thing millions of immigrants saw as they arrived in the New World. “Her name,” the poem declares, is “Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome.”
Read more
