Emma Lazarus's second volume of poems opens with a biographical sketch that describes her as 'a born singer' for whom 'poetry was her natural language.' The collection itself is divided into Jewish poems and translations, with the centerpiece being 'The Dance to Death,' a five-act play set in medieval Germany. The excerpts show Lazarus deploying a stark, unadorned diction in dialogue—characters speak of 'poison-mixers' and 'goblin-tales'—while her lyric poems draw on biblical cadences. The play's opening scene pits the Landgrave against Schnetzen, whose rhetoric twists popular superstition into political expediency: 'The people's voice the voice of God.'

Diction of Persecution

In 'The Dance to Death,' Lazarus crafts a vocabulary of accusation that feels both period-specific and pointed. Schnetzen describes a leathern wallet 'filled with a dry, fine dust / Of rusty black and red, deftly compounded / Of powdered flesh of basilisks, spiders, frogs, / And lizards, baked with sacramental dough / In Christian blood.' The catalogue is deliberately grotesque, mixing the fantastical (basilisks) with the domestic (frogs, lizards) and the sacrilegious (sacramental dough). This verbal excess contrasts with the Landgrave's terse skepticism: 'Such goblin-tales may curdle / The veins of priest-rid women, fools, and children.' Lazarus thus sets a pattern where the persecutors' language is florid and manipulative, while the powerful remain calculatingly laconic.

Biblical Echoes and Inversions

Several poems in the collection draw directly on Hebrew scripture. 'By the Waters of Babylon' invokes Psalm 137, while 'The New Ezekiel' reworks the prophet's vision of dry bones. In the play, the Prior invokes the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as precedent for punishing Jews: 'Did not He purge with fiery hail those twain / Blotches of festering sin.' The Princess Mathildis counters with a moral inversion: 'Justice is murdered; / Oh slander not her corpse.' Lazarus uses these biblical references not as mere ornament but as contested ground—characters weaponize scripture to justify violence or to plead for mercy. The effect is to frame the medieval persecution as a repetition of ancient patterns, with the same texts used for opposite ends.

The Play's Structural Tensions

'The Dance to Death' is divided into five acts, and the excerpts show Lazarus building tension through alternating scenes of political calculation and private anguish. The Landgrave's decision to kill the Jews is presented not as a spontaneous outburst but as a cold negotiation: 'Well, the Jews shall die. / This is the will of God.' Schnetzen's aside—'Ah, vengeance cometh late, Susskind von Orb, / But yet it comes!'—reveals a personal motive beneath the religious rhetoric. The play also includes a scene in the Wartburg Monastery where the Prior and Princess debate divine justice. This structural layering—public decree, private revenge, theological argument—gives the drama a density that the lyric poems, by their nature, compress into single voices.

Translations as Authorial Choice

The second half of the volume contains translations from Hebrew poets of medieval Spain, Petrarch, and Alfred de Musset. Lazarus's selection is itself a statement: she chooses poets who wrote in exile or under duress, such as Moses Ben Esra (c. 1100) and the love songs of Alcharisi. The translations from Petrarch—'In Morte' and 'On the Death of Cardinal'—extend the theme of loss. By placing these works alongside her own Jewish poems, Lazarus creates a dialogue across centuries and languages. The reader is invited to see the medieval Spanish poets as predecessors to the characters in 'The Dance to Death,' and the Italian sonnets as a counterpoint to the Hebrew laments. This juxtaposition is the volume's quiet structural argument about continuity and resilience.

Readers approaching this volume should attend to the interplay between Lazarus's original poems and her translations. The play, in particular, rewards attention to its minor characters—the Prior, the Princess—whose speeches often carry the moral weight. The biographical sketch at the start, though written by another hand, frames the collection as the work of a mind 'ever seeking, ever striving.' That striving is visible in every shift of register, from the bluntness of Schnetzen to the measured grief of the Hebrew poets.