Essay On Emma Lazarus A Masque Of Azarnice

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Raleigh McDonald Mrs. Wood English III Honors 13 Jan 2014 Emma Lazarus: A Masque of Venice Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on July 22, 1849, and is the fourth child of Moses Lazarus, and Esther Lazarus. Moses Lazarus was a wealthy sugar merchant and his wife, Esther Lazarus was well known for her side of the family, which was a family whose members were very influential in New York legal circles. Emma and her siblings were raised in New York and were spoiled by their parents. Emma was very weak as a child and could not leave the house often so all of the Lazarus children were educated at home by private tutors. Lazarus’ first literary achievement happened because of her un-paralleled knack for languages. (7) By the time she was ten she had learned English, French, German, and Italian; these languages enabled her to read books from her father’s library, including poetry books written the earlier stated languages. These books are what sparked her interest in poetry, and were some of the first poems she translated. Lazarus started writing her own poetry along with the poems she translated when the civil war began. While Lazarus was only eleven and might not have known much of war but she did understand how sad her elder male family members were when they came to bid goodbye to her parents. To express her understanding she wrote poems, poems on both war and nature. (7) Five years later her father retired from his job to take care of all of the children and happened upon Lazarus’ poetry notebooks. After reading them and taking a great liking to them, he carried the poems off without Lazarus’ consent and had them published for private circulation. When Lazarus was informed, her poems had already received much praise so, adding t... ... middle of paper ... ...e could be writing about the American dream. Venice starts out as a bright and happy place awaiting the marriage of a prince, but as soon as a closer look is taken, and smaller details are noticed, one realizes that Venice is not as great as it seemed to be. Another idea is that Lazarus was scared of marriage herself because she might have believed that if she were married, her husband would not allow her to write anymore, for in her time it was rare to be a female author. She might have believed her husband would be the prince, and she the bride. For every time her husband would touch her, or get close to marrying her, instead of her getting older like in the poem, she would lose the ability to write poetry and other such things. If one interprets it this way the bride’s scream at the end of the poem could be Lazarus’ fear of losing the ability to express herself.

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