Lola Ridge
Reading edition
Lola Ridge was born in Dublin, Ireland, leaving there in infancy and spending her childhood in Sydney, Australia. After living some years in New Zealand, she returned to Australia to study art. In 1907, she came to the United States, supporting herself for three years by writing fiction for the popular magazines. She stopped this work only, as she says, “because I found I would have to do so if I wished to survive as an artist.” For several years she earned her living in a variety of ways—as organizer for an educational movement, as advertisement writer, as illustrator, artist’s model, factory-worker, etc. In 1918, The New Republic published her long poem The Ghetto and Miss Ridge, until then totally unknown, became the “discovery” of the year.
Her volume The Ghetto and Other Poems (1918) contains one poem that is brilliant, several that are powerful and none that is mediocre. Her title-poem is its pinnacle; in it Miss Ridge touches strange heights. It is essentially a poem of the city, of its sodden brutalities, its sudden beauties. Swift figures shine from these lines, like barbaric colors leaping out of darkness; images that are surprising but never strained glow with a condensed clarity. In her other poems—especially in “The Song of Iron,” “Faces” and “Frank Little at Calvary”—the same dignity is maintained, though with less magic.
Sun-Up (1920) is less integrated, more frankly experimental. But the same vibrancy and restrained power that distinguished her preceding book are manifest here. Her delineations are sensitive and subtle; she accomplishes the maximum in effects with a minimum of effort.
PASSAGES FROM “THE GHETTO”
Old Sodos no longer makes saddles.
He has forgotten how ...
Time spins like a crazy dial in his brain,
And night by night
263I see the love-gesture of his arm
In its green-greasy coat-sleeve
Circling the Book,
And the candles gleaming starkly
On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face,
Like a miswritten psalm ...
Night by night
I hear his lifted praise,
Like a broken whinnying
Before the Lord’s shut gate.
* * *
Lights go out
And the stark trunks of the factories
Melt into the drawn darkness,
Sheathing like a seamless garment.
And mothers take home their babies,
Waxen and delicately curled,
Like little potted flowers closed under the stars....
Lights go out ...
And colors rush together,
Fusing and floating away.
Pale worn gold like the settings of old jewels ...
Mauve, exquisite, tremulous, and luminous purples,
And burning spires in aureoles of light
Like shimmering auras.
264They are covering up the pushcarts ...
Now all have gone save an old man with mirrors—
Little oval mirrors like tiny pools.
He shuffles up a darkened street
And the moon burnishes his mirrors till they shine like phosphorus....
The moon like a skull,
Staring out of eyeless sockets at the old men trundling home the pushcarts.
* * *
A sallow dawn is in the sky
As I enter my little green room.
Without, the frail moon,
Worn to a silvery tissue,
Throws a faint glamour on the roofs,
And down the shadowy spires
Lights tip-toe out ...
Softly as when lovers close street doors.
Out of the Battery
A little wind
Stirs idly—as an arm
Trails over a boat’s side in dalliance—
Rippling the smooth dead surface of the heat,
And Hester street,
Like a forlorn woman over-borne
By many babies at her teats,
Turns on her trampled bed to meet the day.
265
NEW ORLEANS
Do you remember
Honey-melon moon
Dripping thick sweet light
Where Canal Street saunters off by herself among quiet trees?
And the faint decayed patchouli—
Fragrance of New Orleans ...
New Orleans,
Like a dead tube rose
Upheld in the warm air ...
Miraculously whole.
WIND IN THE ALLEYS
Wind, rising in the alleys,
My spirit lifts in you like a banner streaming free of hot walls.
You are full of unshaped dreams ...
You are laden with beginnings ...
There is hope in you ... not sweet ... acrid as blood in the mouth.
Come into my tossing dust
Scattering the peace of old deaths,
Wind rising out of the alleys
Carrying stuff of flame.
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