Lola Ridge, born in Dublin in 1873 and later a vivid presence in New York’s radical modernist circles, wrote “Secrets” in a period when free verse and psychoanalytic thought were opening poetry to the hidden textures of the mind. Collected in Sun-Up and Other Poems (1920), the poem turns away from Ridge’s well-known urban crowd scenes toward the threshold between sleep and waking. That threshold is not peaceful; it is where hidden things surface, press against the skin, and leave marks.
The poem addresses secrets directly, as though they were small, feral intruders. The speaker asks whether they entered “my wound from another wound / brushing mine in a crowd,” an image that makes hidden pain almost contagious, passed between bodies by accidental proximity. The alternative question complicates innocence: maybe the speaker “snared” them on her own “sharper edges,” just as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up carries off spiders on its wings. In that simile, secrets are not only wounds but also clingy, spindly creatures that attach themselves to whatever moves through the world. The self may be hurt or may be the trap; either way, the secrets infest and travel without permission.
Ridge’s free verse refuses the comfort of a regular meter or rhyme scheme. Lines stretch and contract, and ellipses open gaps of silence, as if the poem itself is listening. The repeated word “Secrets” becomes a hushed summons at the start of each movement. Sound does the work of rhyme: the liquid ache of “wound from another wound,” the crowding consonants in “brushing mine in a crowd,” the sticky sibilance of “snare,” “spiders,” and “suave wind.” These echoes make the language feel intimate and slightly feverish, matching a state in which the boundary between self and world has begun to blur.
The second movement turns toward dawn, yet morning brings no clean resolution. Dawn comes “tip-toeing / ushered by a suave wind,” graceful and faintly menacing. Dreams “disintegrate / like breath shapes in frosty air,” visible for a moment and then gone—exactly how the secrets operate: they can be sensed but not held. The speaker expects to “overhear” them, “bare-foot, / scatting off into the darkness,” a quick, furtive retreat. What remains is concrete evidence: “litter” and “bloody foot-prints.” The secrets themselves are never named or caught, only known by the wounding trail they leave.
What makes “Secrets” significant is its refusal to offer easy exposure or healing. Ridge does not suggest that hidden truths can be neatly excavated and put away. Instead, she treats them as wounds that move between people and as creatures that flee when consciousness arrives. The final image reads like the aftermath of an invisible intruder: blood on the floor, no body, no confession. It is an unsettling vision, but also an honest one. Hidden things rarely disappear; they limp away barefoot, leaving marks that teach us to read our own damage.