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.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 02, 2023

42 sec read
310

Quick analysis:

Scheme XAXBBXXXXXA ACDEADBEA AXXXXXBCB
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 867
Words 137
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 11, 9, 9

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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