Lola Ridge was an Irish-born poet who settled in New York and wrote in the early decades of the twentieth century, when American cities were swelling with industrial labor and radical politics. Her work belongs to the free-verse revolution of modernism, but her eye was less on the inner self than on the bodies of the poor, the immigrant, and the overworked. “An Old Workman” is a six-line portrait that turns an elderly laborer into a kind of object, worn down until he seems part of the city’s stone.
The poem presents a man who is no longer fully seen as a person. Ridge gives him no name, no voice, and no past. Instead, she describes him through comparison to a “cracked paving-stone,” an object that exists only to be stepped on. That simile carries the central idea: work has not merely exhausted this man; it has changed his very nature. His “spine askew” and body “shrunken into half its space” suggest someone bent and compressed by years of physical effort. The word “shrunken” is especially cruel because it implies that part of his existence has been worn away. He has become smaller than the life he once occupied.
The form mirrors this breaking down. There is no regular meter and no rhyme to comfort the ear. Instead, the lines halt and lurch, broken by dashes and ellipses. The opening line—“Warped... gland-dry...”—arrives in two jagged fragments, like a diagnosis delivered without sympathy. Short lines isolate each detail: “With spine askew / And body shrunken into half its space...” The pauses force the eye to move slowly, the way an old worker might move, and the lack of a final full stop until the very end lets one image sink into the next. This is free verse, but it is not loose; every break sharpens the sense of reduction.
Ridge’s language turns the man’s body into a landscape. “Grimed and pitted front” calls up a face, but also a wall or road surface, darkened with dirt and scarred by weather. The word “front” is deliberately impersonal—not face, not brow, but the surface that meets the world. The final image, “A stamp... as of innumerable feet,” completes the transformation. He bears a mark, but it is not a mark of identity; it is the mark left by countless others walking over him. “Well-used” is the language of tools, not people. “Gland-dry” drains away moisture and vitality, linking old age to a dried-up machine. Even the paving-stone simile denies him agency: a stone does not move, choose, or resist. It simply lies beneath the feet of the city.
What makes the poem significant is its compression and its refusal to sentimentalize. In six spare lines, Ridge turns social critique into something almost physical. The old workman’s body becomes evidence of a system that uses people until they are no longer useful, then leaves them as part of the pavement. Written in an era of growing labor unrest, the poem gives dignity not through pity but through precise, unflinching attention. The old workman is not a symbol of noble suffering; he is a human being reduced to material, and Ridge wants the reader to notice that loss. In doing so, she makes a brief but lasting record of the human cost that a busy city steps over every day.