Sun-Up, and Other Poems — Themes and Context

Childhood as a Fractured Lens

The opening poem 'Sun-Up' presents childhood not as nostalgia but as a series of sharp, disjointed impressions. The speaker recalls a girl with 'black, black eyes' and a recurring nightmare of a man clutching her hair, his eyes 'stick out like spears.' Ridge uses repetition—'Please God, don't let me dream any more'—to convey trauma that resists closure. The child's world is populated by adults who are both protectors and sources of fear: Celia's shadow 'rocks and rocks,' while the father is obscured by 'the big yellow bowl / like the moon with two handles.' These images are not explained but presented as fragments, inviting readers to piece together the emotional logic.

Urban Landscapes and Mechanical Rhythms

In the 'Windows' section, Ridge turns her attention to the city, personifying buildings and infrastructure with a mixture of irony and awe. 'Time-Stone' addresses the Metropolitan as a 'flight of ledger books' overrun with 'ant-black figures / Dancing on spindle legs,' contrasting the mechanical tally of time with the 'silver whistle of a moonbeam.' 'Train Window' sketches 'tubercular towns / Coughing a little in the dawn,' where the church's 'natty spire' becomes a site of gossip: 'Tzz-tzz… tzz-tzz… tzz-tzz….' The poem 'Electricity' fuses industrial and erotic energy, describing 'charged phallases / Of iron leaping / Female and male, / Complete, indivisible, one, / Fused into light.' Ridge's city is alive with tension, its skyscrapers 'remote, unpartisan' yet holding secrets 'better than all the policemen.'

Nature Reimagined Through Restraint

Even in poems that invoke the natural world, Ridge's imagery is filtered through urban confinement. 'Cactus Seed' begins with a canary's song piercing a 'narrow-chested room,' its notes like 'trillions of icily / peltering notes' that threaten to overwhelm the speaker. The poem then imagines canaries singing 'out of cages' by a 'fork of grassed earth,' where their notes would 'sink in the spirit… lie germinal.' But the final stanza pivots to a cactus flower 'star-yellow / ray out of spiked green,' and the speaker calls out 'God… God…' as if reaching for a transcendence that remains just out of reach. The wind 'scandal-mongers with gum trees,' a phrase that echoes the gossip of 'Train Window,' linking the natural and social worlds through a shared pattern of restless observation.

Ridge's poems reward attention to their sonic texture—the hiss of 'Tzz-tzz,' the percussive 'peltering notes,' the long vowels of 'moonbeam / Falling between my stoop-shouldered walls.' Readers may find it useful to read the collection in the order Ridge arranged, noting how the child's voice of 'Sun-Up' gives way to the more overtly political 'Sons of Belial' and the final 'Reveille' section. The poems resist easy categorization, moving between free verse and irregular rhyme, and between private memory and public critique.

There’s a particular ache in Lola Ridge’s poems—that childlike wonder pressed against harsh streets—which stays with me long after closing the book. It reminds me of another voice, older and equally unflinching: Sappho, whose fragments feel like small, human truths barely held. Sometimes I think Ridge’s quiet domestic scenes carry that same ancient, urgent tenderness. Sappho: A New Rendering — Text and Context rests beside her on my shelf, both whispering across decades.