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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emma Lazarus
Emma Lazarus
Posthumously famous for her sonnet, "The New Colossus," which is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus is considered America's first important Jewish poet...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Oceans
A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
Half Mile Down
by Michael Ryan
harbor (the conversion)
by Nick Flynn
Inland
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Our Valley
by Philip Levine
Out of the Rolling Ocean, the Crowd
by Walt Whitman
Sea Fever
by John Masefield
The Ocean
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage
by Wallace Stevens
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By the Waters of Babylon [V. Currents]

 
by Emma Lazarus

1. Vast oceanic movements, the flux and reflux of immeasurable tides, oversweep our continent.

2. From the far Caucasian steppes, from the squalid Ghettos of Europe,

3. From Odessa and Bucharest, from Kief and Ekaterinoslav,

4. Hark to the cry of the exiles of Babylon, the voice of Rachel mourning for her children, of Israel lamenting for Zion.

5. And lo, like a turbid stream, the long-pent flood bursts the dykes of oppression and rushes hitherward.

6. Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them.

7. The herdsman of Canaan and the seed of Jerusalem's royal shepherd renew their youth amid the pastoral plains of Texas and the golden valleys of the Sierras.







This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on May 26, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
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