Most poems about ambition keep one eye on its cost. Emma Lazarus's "Success" refuses to. Its speaker has "oft" brooded on "defeat and pain," on "the pathos of the stupid, stumbling throng," but announces a holiday from all that: "These I ignore to-day." What replaces the gloom is a single wish, to "pour my soul forth in one trumpet strain" in praise of people whose will carries them through. The central idea is that real success belongs to those who persist, and that it deserves celebration without hedging. The poem is careful about order here. The man it admires has "persisted and achieved," in that sequence, and the persistence comes first.
The form is a fourteen-line sonnet, but a restless one. The first eight lines lean hard on one sound: "throng," "long," "song," "strong" all share the same ending, like a note held while the speaker gathers breath. That suits a poem about wanting to sing. Lines 6 and 7, "endeavor" and "forever," end on a falling double beat and stretch past the usual ten syllables, as if the praise were overflowing its container. The turn comes at line 9, when the speaker stops talking about herself and addresses the reader with the archaic "Hast thou beheld...?" The question turns into a command, "Rejoice!", and then into a chorus, "Salute him with free heart and choral voice." A private song becomes a public one. The closing couplet pairs "wan" with "man," which looks like a rhyme on the page but barely chimes in speech, so the poem's final pairing is a little off-key.
The imagery works through sound, light and clothing. The song is a "trumpet strain," a "grief-shattering" one, so loud that it breaks sorrow rather than answering it. "Palm-bearing, laurel deeds" borrows old emblems of victory, and success is something worn: "the splendor clothing him whose will is strong." The most striking image is human. Instead of describing the deed, the speaker points to "the deep, glad eyes of one," placing success in a face. The sun, called "all-seeing," then becomes a witness: "On naught diviner shines." Nature itself is made to approve. Notice, too, how often "one" appears ("one trumpet strain," "One clear... song," "eyes of one"). The poem shrinks from the plural "throng" to the singular achiever.
The poem's most interesting tension sits in its last three lines. The achiever stands "'Midst flippant, feeble crowds of spectres wan," and those spectres are the same crowd that earlier drew "pathos." Pity has curdled into scorn. The ghosts are pale and weightless, while the man is "bold, significant, successful," and a word like "significant" suggests that meaning itself is awarded only to the victorious. Everyone else becomes background. The speaker never argues with defeat, only decides to "ignore" it, and a reader may wonder how secure a triumph is if it needs such a crowd of pale extras to show it off. The final line is also firmly gendered, ending on "man," as "man's high endeavor" did earlier.
That edge is what makes the poem worth reading. Anyone who knows Lazarus from "The New Colossus," with its welcome to the tired and poor, may be struck by how different this speaker's sympathies are, though a single poem can't tell us what the poet herself believed. Read on its own terms, "Success" is a rare thing: an unembarrassed hymn to achievement that lets its own exuberance show the cracks. Its trumpet is meant to drown out doubt, yet the contempt of the last lines is what lingers. The poem is both a celebration and an unwitting portrait of how triumph can make us look past everyone who didn't win.