The Song

Parade to War, Allegory by John Steuart Curry, 1938

Few have heard of Lola Ridge, the modernist poet who has been compared to Emily Dickinson, Siegfried Sassoon, and the Georgian trench poets. She was an anarchist who protested the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti; she was arrested with Edna St. Vincent Millay; and she was an immigrant who defended the poor and oppressed, challenging readers to confront the ugly realities of prejudice and suffering. When Ridge died in 1941, her obituary in the New York Times described her as “one of the leading contemporary poets” who “found in the meeting of many races in America the hope of a new world.”* Ridge’s 1918 poetry collection The Ghetto included her war poem “The Song.”

The Song

That day, in the slipping of torsos and straining flanks on the bloodied ooze of fields plowed by the iron,

And the smoke bluish near earth and bronze in the sunshine floating like cotton-down,

And the harsh and terrible screaming,

And that strange vibration at the roots of us …

Desire, fierce, like a song …

And we heard

Early Morning on the Avenue in May 1917, Childe Hassam 

(Do you remember?)

All the Red Cross bands on Fifth avenue

And bugles in little home towns,

And children’s harmonicas bleating

            AMERICA!

And after …

(Do you remember?)

The drollery of the wind on our faces,

And horizons reeling,

And the terror of the plain

Heaving like a gaunt pelvis to the sun …

Under us—threshing and twanging

Torn-up roots of the Song …

            —Lola Ridge

In a series of concentrated images, the poem juxtaposes the suffering of soldiers with the patriotic music that sent them to war. As muscles scream with the effort of moving through mud, blood, smoke and artillery fire, soldiers feel a fierce desire to live as a “strange vibration at the roots of us,” resonating like song. And that desire evokes the memory of send-off parades accompanied by the notes of bugles and the sound of children playing patriotic tunes from New York City to “little home towns,” all “bleating,” as if piping sheep to the slaughter: “AMERICA!”

The Return of Private Davis from the Argonne,
by John Steuart Curry 

In the aftermath of an attack, some soldiers find themselves alive, and even the touch of the breeze seems whimsical. But terror lurks just beneath the surface, and the old songs, mutilated by war, can never be heard in the same way again. As in many of her other poems, Ridge describes individuals “stretched to the limits of existence” and she “confronts the bystander as complicit in the suffering of others by virtue of the gaze.”**

A review of The Ghetto published in Poetry magazine in 1918 predicted, “Ridge will be charged with lunacy, incendiarism, nihilism, by the average American who reads her book. The everlasting minority will proclaim her another free singer, another creator of free form.***  Conrad Aiken wrote of The Ghetto, ““it is singular to come upon a book written by a woman in which vigor is so clearly a more natural quality than grace.”†

 

Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge died of tuberculosis in 1941; shortly before her death she wrote, “Nice is the one adjective in the world that is laughable applied to any single thing I have ever written.”††

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*”Lola Ridge, Poet, Dies in Brooklyn,” New York Times, 21 May 1941, p. 23.

** Anna Hueppauff, Lola Ridge: Poet and Renegade Modernist, thesis, Edith Cowan University, 2012, pp. 14–15.

*** Alfred Kreymborg, “A Poet in Arms,” Poetry, vol. 13, no. 6, March 1919, p. 336.

† Aiken, “The Literary Abbozzo,” Dial, vol. 66, no. 782, 1919, p. 83.

†† Ridge, qtd. in Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, by Terese Svoboda, Schaffner Press, 2016.