Lola Ridge’s “The Song” begins in the thick of battle: bodies slipping in bloodied mud, fields torn by iron, smoke, screaming, and a strange fierce desire running through the speaker like a song. The speaker remembers the patriotic music of home—Red Cross bands on Fifth Avenue, bugles in small towns, children’s harmonicas bleating “America!”—and the memory feels bright but naive and far away from the soldiers’ physical horror. There is both longing and disillusionment in that memory.
Afterward comes a disorienting stillness: wind on the face, reeling horizons, and the plain heaving “like a gaunt pelvis to the sun,” an exposed, almost sexualized image of landscape and death. The song that once promised glory is now torn up and twanging underfoot. The mood is hallucinatory, bitter, and haunted, catching war’s power to shatter both bodies and the ideals that surround them.