Lola Ridge was an Irish-born poet who settled in New York in the early twentieth century and became part of the city’s radical modernist moment, writing alongside experimenters who wanted to capture the speed, noise, and electric glow of urban life. “Nocturne” was first collected around 1920, when Ridge was living in lower Manhattan and writing about tenements, laborers, and night streets. Its title gestures toward a musical night piece, but the landscape is not a moonlit meadow. It opens instead with an “indigo bulb of darkness” punctured by “needle lights,” and the natural sky is only visible through a “fissure of brick canyon shutting out stars.” The moon itself seems urbanized, a “sliver” that is “spigoting two high windows over the West river,” as if light flowed from a tap rather than fell from the sky.
The situation is simple: the speaker addresses a “boy” met that night and tries to understand why his eyes remain lodged in the mind. Yet the language makes the encounter strange. The boy’s eyes are not pretty or starlike; they are “two red-glowing arcs shifting with my vision,” electric and unstable, almost like the city lights outside. They “reflect as in a fading proof / The deadened eyes of a woman,” a compressed and ambiguous image in which the boy, a woman, and the speaker’s own perception seem to occupy the same gaze. His “shed virginity” becomes “light as the withered pod of a sweet pea, / Moist and fragrant,” a simile that joins dryness and scent, loss and tenderness. The pod is withered, but it still has a living moisture, and it “blows against” the speaker’s soul, suggesting touch without resolution.
Ridge works in free verse, with no regular rhyme scheme and uneven lines that follow the flicker of a passing thought. The opening image pauses without a main verb until “punctured” arrives, and the ellipses after “West river” and “shifting with my vision” leave the reader hanging in the uncertain dark. Sonic patterns do some of the work of rhyme: the short “i” sounds in “indigo,” “fissure,” and “spigoting” needle through the first lines, while the later “s” sounds in “shed,” “sweet pea,” and “soul” create an intimate hush. The repeated word “eyes” anchors the poem, moving from the boy’s “red-glowing arcs” to the “deadened eyes” of the woman and finally to the speaker’s own way of seeing.
What makes “Nocturne” significant is its treatment of a fleeting urban encounter as a serious psychological event. The speaker has passed “so many lights”—both literal lamps and, by implication, many other faces and bodies—yet still carries this boy’s eyes “like swinging lanterns.” The closing question is left unanswered, and that openness is the point. The poem suggests that memory does not necessarily preserve long relationships or dramatic scenes; sometimes it keeps a glance, a texture, a momentary glow. In Ridge’s fragmented city, where brick canyons shut out the stars, a stranger’s eyes can become the one small source of moving light.