Analysis of Manhattan

Lola Ridge 1873 – 1941



Out of the night you burn, Manhattan,
In a vesture of gold -
Span of innumerable arcs,
Flaring and multiplying -
Gold at the uttermost circles fading
Into the tenderest hint of jade,
Or fusing in tremulous twilight blues,
Robing the far-flung offices,
Scintillant-storied, forking flame,
Or soaring to luminous amethyst
Over the steeples aureoled -

Diaphanous gold,
Veiling the Woolworth, argently
Rising slender and stark
Mellifluous-shrill as a vender's cry,
And towers squatting graven and cold
On the velvet bales of the dark,
And the Singer's appraising
Indolent idol's eye,
And night like a purple cloth unrolled -

Nebulous gold
Throwing an ephemeral glory about life's vanishing points,
Wherein you burn…
You of unknown voltage
Whirling on your axis…
Scrawling vermillion signatures
Over the night's velvet hoarding…
Insolent, towering spherical
To apices ever shifting.


Scheme XAXBBXXXXXA ACDEADBEA AXXXXXBCB
Poetic Form
Metre 110111010 00111 11010001 100100 11011010 0101111 110010011 1011100 110101 1101100100 100101 01001 10011 101001 111011 010101001 10101101 0010010 10011 01101011 1001 1010100100111001 0111 110110 101110 1010100 10011010 100100100 111010
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 867
Words 137
Sentences 2
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 11, 9, 9
Lines Amount 29
Letters per line (avg) 25
Words per line (avg) 5
Letters per stanza (avg) 237
Words per stanza (avg) 45
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 02, 2023

42 sec read
327

Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge was an anarchist poet and an influential editor of avant-garde feminist and Marxist publications best remembered for her long poems and poetic sequences She along with other political poets of the early Modernist period has been coming under increasing critical scrutiny at the beginning of the twenty-first century more…

All Lola Ridge poems | Lola Ridge Books

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