Lola Ridge was an Irish-born poet who became part of American modernism in the early twentieth century, publishing in avant-garde magazines and writing free verse that ranged from gritty city scenes to compressed, visionary lyrics. “Interim” belongs to that lyrical mode: it is a brief meditation on a pause in the natural world, written at a time when poets were stripping away rhyme and regular meter to follow the movement of perception itself.
The poem imagines the earth not as a spinning globe but as something momentarily still: “motionless / And poised in space.” The word “poised” suggests balance and readiness rather than lifelessness. Ridge immediately transforms the planet into “a great bird resting in its flight,” an image that is deliberately paradoxical. How can a bird rest while in flight? The answer lies in the idea of an interim — a suspension between two beats, not an ending. The earth hovers “Between the alleys of the stars,” a phrase that shrinks vast space into something almost domestic, as if the cosmos were a neighborhood of narrow lanes. That combination of the immense and the intimate is central to the poem’s effect.
In the next section, the wind is given a break: “It is the wind’s hour off.” The everyday phrase “hour off” turns the wind into a laborer taking rest, and the ellipses after “off” let the line trail into silence, as though the speaker too is pausing to listen. The wind has “nestled down among the corn,” a soft, nestling image that suggests comfort and concealment. Then Ridge introduces a quiet mystery: “The two speak privately together, / Awaiting the whirr of wings.” The two may be the earth and the wind, or the wind and the corn; the poem deliberately leaves the pairing open. What matters is the privacy of their exchange and the shared anticipation. They are not idle. They are waiting, as if the whole landscape has leaned in to hear something approaching.
Ridge builds this suspension through sound and line. The poem has no rhyme scheme and no regular meter, but it is carefully cadenced. Short lines isolate key words — “motionless,” “poised,” “resting,” “awaiting” — so that each one carries weight. The repeated ellipses create actual pauses on the page, mimicking the interim the poem describes. Alliteration and soft consonants in “wind has nestled down among the corn” create a hushed, murmuring music, while the final “whirr of wings” introduces a slight onomatopoeic flutter, the only hint of future motion. Because the whirr never actually arrives, the poem ends on a threshold, leaving the reader inside the hush.
What makes “Interim” significant is the way it turns a tiny slice of perception into a cosmic condition. Ridge does not moralize or explain; she presents the earth and wind in a state of attentive stillness, and lets that image resonate. In a period of rapid industrialization and social upheaval, her poem offers a different kind of power: the power of pause, privacy, and readiness. The final line suggests that whatever comes next — wind, wingbeat, change — is already being awaited by the world itself. The reader is left not with an ending but with the charged quiet before movement returns.