Fog

Emma Lazarus

Light silken curtain, colorless and soft,
Dreamlike before me floating! what abides
                 Behind thy pearly veil’s
                 Opaque, mysterious woof?

Where sleek red kine, and dappled, crunch daylong
Thick, luscious blades and purple clover-heads,
                Nigh me I still can mark
                Cool fields of beaded grass.

No more; for on the rim of the globed world
I seem to stand and stare at nothingness.
                But songs of unseen birds
                And tranquil roll of waves

Bring sweet assurance of continuous life
Beyond this silvery cloud. Fantastic dreams,
                Of tissue subtler still
                Than the wreathed fog, arise,

And cheat my brain with airy vanishings
And mystic glories of the world beyond.
                A whole enchanted town
                Thy baffling folds conceal—

An orient town, with slender-steepled mosques,
Turret from turret springing, dome from dome,
                Fretted with burning stones,
                And trellised with red gold.

Through spacious streets, where running waters  flow,
Sun-screened by fruit-trees and the  broad-leaved palm,
                Past the gay-decked bazaars,
                Walk turbaned, dark-eyed men.

Hark! you can hear the many murmuring tongues,
While loud the merchants vaunt their gorgeous wares.
                The sultry air is spiced
                With fragrance of rich gums,

And through the lattice high in yon dead wall,
See where, unveiled, an arch, young, dimpled face,
                Flushed like a musky peach,
                Peers down upon the mart!

From her dark, ringleted and bird-poised head
She hath cast back the milk-white silken veil:
                ’Midst the blank blackness there
                She blossoms like a rose.

Beckons she not with those bright, full-orbed eyes,
And open arms that like twin moonbeams gleam?
                Behold her smile on me
                With honeyed, scarlet lips!

Divine Scheherazade! I am thine.
I come! I come!—Hark! from some far-off mosque
                The shrill muezzin calls
                The hour of silent prayer,

And from the lattice he hath scared by love.
The lattice vanisheth itself—the street,
               The mart, the Orient town;
                Only through still, soft air

That cry is yet prolonged. I wake to hear
The distant fog-horn peal: before mine eyes
                Stands the white wall of mist,
                Blending with vaporous skies.

Elusive gossamer, impervious
Even to the mighty sun-god’s keen red shafts!
                With what a jealous art
                Thy secret thou dost guard!

Well do I know deep in thine inmost folds,
Within an opal hollow, there abides
                The lady of the mist,
                The Undine of the air—

A slender, winged, ethereal, lily form,
Dove-eyed, with fair, free-floating, pearl-wreathed hair,
                In waving raiment swathed
                Of changing, irised hues.

Where her feet, rosy as a shell, have grazed
The freshened grass, a richer emerald glows:
                Into each flower-cup
                Her cool dews she distills.

She knows the tops of jagged mountain-peaks,
She knows the green soft hollows of their sides,
                And unafraid she floats
                O’er the vast-circled seas.

She loves to bask within the moon’s wan beams,
Lying, night-long, upon the moist, dark earth,
                And leave her seeded pearls
                With morning on the grass.

Ah! that athwart these dim, gray outer courts
Of her fantastic palace I might pass,
                And reach the inmost shrine
                Of her chaste solitude,

And feel her cool and dewy fingers press
My mortal-fevered brow, while in my heart
                She poured with tender love
                Her healing Lethe-balm!

See! the close curtain moves, the spell dissolves!
Slowly it lifts: the dazzling sunshine streams
                Upon a newborn world and laughing summer seas.
                And laughing summer seas.

Swift, snowy-breasted sandbirds twittering glance
Through crystal air. On the horizon’s marge,
                Like a huge purple wraith,
         The dusky fog retreats.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 1, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“Fog” appears in The Poems of Emma Lazarus: In Two Volumes: Vol. I: Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889). In her article, “Words and Worlds: Emma Lazarus’s Conflicting Citizenships” (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Autumn 1987, Vol. 6, No. 2), Diane Lichtenstein, author and professor emerita of English at Beloit College, noted: “Because [Emma Lazarus] understood herself as an author, not as a True Woman—a mother or a wife—Lazarus sought access to the American nation through the world of American letters. The figure from whom she requested the most help in her difficult journey was Ralph Waldo Emerson. […]. Between 1866 and Emerson’s death in 1882, the two corresponded. In two early letters, dated February 24 and April 14, 1868, Emerson established himself as Lazarus’s mentor; in the first letter, he wrote that her poems had ‘important merits,’ and in the second, ‘I should like to be appointed your professor’ in both reading and writing.”

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