Lola Ridge’s “A Memory,” collected in her 1920 volume Sun-Up and Other Poems, belongs to the same wave of modernist free verse that prized sharp images and spontaneous rhythms over fixed rhyme. Ridge was born in Dublin in 1873 and spent part of her childhood in New Zealand and Australia before settling in New York, where she became known for politically charged poems about the urban poor. This lyric, however, turns to a remembered tropical coast, and its power lies in what remains unspoken between two figures sitting close but not touching.
The poem recreates an atmosphere more than a narrative. It opens with the speaker recalling the “crackle of the palm trees” over “mooned white roofs,” where the unusual participle “mooned” turns moonlight into a wash of white color across the town. The surf has a “tender fumbling” on “sulphur-yellow beaches,” an image that gives the water an almost human hesitancy. In that humid, “close-pressing night,” the two people sit “a little apart,” and that distance becomes the emotional center of the poem. The world is overwhelmingly warm and alive, yet the human figures hold back.
Ridge builds the scene through similes that blend ripeness with innocence. The moon hangs “like a golden mango,” an edible, glowing fruit, while the moist air clings “warm and fragrant as the open mouth of a child.” These comparisons make the tropical air feel intimate, almost uncomfortably close, and they set a dreamlike tone in which desire is present but not direct. The sea rolls outward to the “purple edge of the world,” then turns “ever back upon itself,” its repeated motion mirroring the couple’s hesitation. Ellipses in lines such as “As we...” and “Inadequate night...” let the thought trail off, as if memory itself cannot complete what happened.
The lyric’s music comes not from end rhyme but from repetition, spacing, and sound patterns. The recurrence of “mooned white” links the opening roofs to the final “mooned white memory,” making the entire recollection seem steeped in reflected light. Short, suspended phrases—“The shining town...” and “Inadequate night...”—create pauses that slow the reader, much as the remembered moment seems to hang in time. The ellipses act like little withheld breaths. The word “inadequate” is deliberately jarring amid so much lush beauty. The night was visually and sensually full, yet for the speaker it lacked something: complete closeness, confession, or consummation.
That lack is the poem’s real subject. The memory does not return as a sharp image but “softly... comes up / Like an ungathered lily.” The lily remains untouched, still rooted in the past, never picked or possessed. Ridge suggests that some experiences stay vivid precisely because they were left unfinished. The speaker preserves the scene as an unopened possibility rather than a completed event. In this way, a tropical night of near-overwhelming sensuality becomes a study in restraint, and the poem’s significance lies in its honest recognition that longing can be more durable than fulfillment.