Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Joseph Friedlander, comp. The Standard Book of Jewish Verse. 1917.

By Emma Lazarus

To Carmen Sylva (Queen of Roumania)

OH, that the golden lyre divine

Whence David smote flame-tones were mine!

Oh, that the silent harp which hung

Untuned, unstrung,

Upon the willows by the river,

Would throb beneath my touch and quiver

With the old song-enchanted spell

Of Israel!

Oh, that the large prophetic Voice

Would make my reed-piped throat its choice!

All ears should prick, all hearts should spring

To hear me sing

The burden of the isles, the word

Assyria knew, Damascus heard,

When, like the wind, while cedars shake,

Isaiah spake.

For I would frame a song to-day

Winged like a bird to cleave its way

O’er land and sea that spread between,

To where a Queen

Sits with a triple coronet.

Genius and Sorrow both have set

Their diadems above the gold—

A Queen three-fold!

To her the forest lent its lyre,

Hers are the sylvan dews, the fire

Of Orient suns, the mist-wreathed gleams

Of mountain streams.

She, the imperial Rhine’s own child,

Takes to her heart the wood-nymph wild,

The gipsy Pelech, and the wide

White Danube’s tide.

She who beside an infant’s bier

Long since resigned all hope to hear,

The sacred name of “Mother” bless

Her childlessness,

Now from a people’s sole acclaim

Receives the heart-vibrating name,

And “Mother, Mother, Mother!” fills

The echoing hills.

Yet who is he who pines apart,

Estranged from that maternal heart,

Ungraced, unfriended, and forlorn,

The butt of scorn?

An alien in his land of birth,

An outcast from his brethren’s earth,

Albeit with theirs his blood mixed well

When Plevna fell?

When all Roumania’s chains were riven,

When unto all his sons was given

The hero’s glorious reward,

Reaped by the sword,—

Wherefore was this poor thrall, whose chains

Hung heaviest, within whose veins

The oldest blood of freedom streamed,

Still unredeemed?