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Compare And Contrast Brutus And The New Colossus

Decent Essays

Joseph Bruchac and Emma Lazarus were intensely different people. They were born during changing times, with different beliefs and perspectives about life. Yet one thing captured these two divergent characters minds. America, and the promise that that very name holds. The truth that one could make a better life here, and be accepted for whatever they are. Although they both wrote about America and the American experience, they did it in such a way that provoked very disparate feelings from one poem to the other.

When Lazarus chose The New Colossus as the title for her poem, she was challenging two things. One, the idea that America was a fledgling country, and two, the notion that it would stay that way. It did so by comparing the Statue of …show more content…

Being that he was born quite a bit later than Lazarus, instead of feeling the same hope she felt, he feels pride. In Bruchac’s poem Ellis Island he writes “I too come to this island, nine decades the answerer of dreams.” This shows how he feels, like Lazarus, that America still shines her torch to collect the weary and transport them to a new opportunity. He too feels that here is the land for your wishes to become possible, in a way they never were in the old world. You can divulge this from the stanza (among others),” after leaving the sickness, the old Empires of Europe.”While it is clear he feels pride for his Slovak grandparents, it is also clear that a struggle is taking place. Not a struggle for anything physical, but for some internal balance of right and wrong. For although he does has a lineage of immigrants, that is only part of his story. Bruchac makes it clear to the reader in the beginning of the third stanza that his conflict is about having mixed heritage. “Another voice speaks of native lands within this nation.” So well he is standing in Ellis Island rejoicing for his Slovakian side, Bruchac at the same time is mourning for what the Europeans did to his American Indian ancestors. He is thinking of times past “when the earth became owned” and what was once a land that belonged to no one but those who cared for it, and was cared for by

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