Source identified1
Image design Botanical Sage
Read & copy
“Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them.”
Meaning & context
Lazarus’s prose-poem narrator personifies America as receiving Jewish refugees, making national hospitality part of the work’s meditation on exile and migration.
Source details
By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose, V. “Currents,” first published in March 1887 and represented by Project Gutenberg #3473. The line follows the image of Jewish exiles fleeing oppression toward America. It expresses a literary and historical ideal of welcome; it is not presented as evidence that immigrants in practice were universally welcomed.