Dispossession usually announces a calamity—loss of home, property, identity. Yet in Lola Ridge’s short lyric “Dispossessed,” it becomes a state of almost terrible lightness. Ridge, born in Dublin in 1873 and raised partly in New Zealand before settling in New York, wrote during the early twentieth century amid the upheavals of immigration, industrial labor, and the First World War. She was known for fierce poems about factory workers and the urban poor, but here she turns inward, tracing a soul newly stripped of everything, invited into sunlight but warned not to examine what it has left behind.
The poem opens in motion. Wind turns up the “tender and tremulous green of leaves,” twangs among the vines, and blows “a clear path / For the new-stripped soul to pass.” That word “new-stripped” makes dispossession sound like a removal of rind or skin—painful, perhaps, but also fresh. The soul appears “naked,” compared to “a wisp of smoke in the sunlight / On the hill-side shimmering.” It is barely solid, and that is precisely its freedom. Ridge addresses it directly as “little soul,” urging it to dance like “a thistle-down floating / Over the butterflies / And the lumbering bees.” The central idea is not that loss is painless; it is that loss can reduce a person to an essential, floating thing, and that this reduction may open into grace. But the poem insists the soul must choose that grace. “Come away from that tree / And its shadow grey as a stone,” the speaker says. The shadow is inert, cold, heavy. Beneath the tree lies “that bleak thing,” deliberately unnamed. It may be the body, a former life, a dead love, or grief itself. The vagueness makes it larger than any single thing; it is whatever the soul might turn back into if it lingers.
The music of the poem enacts this release. Ridge does not use a regular rhyme scheme, but she builds rhythm through repetition and short, suspended lines. The repeated words “sunlight,” “shimmering,” and “shadow” become a kind of chant, while alliteration in “tender and tremulous” and the hard twang of “Twanging among the vines” give the landscape texture. Near-echoes such as “grass” and “pass” and the long vowels of “Blowing a clear path” pull the reader forward, just as the wind pulls the soul. The dash after “golden rain--” creates a pause before the final warning, a turn from warm immersion to refusal. With no fixed meter, the poem feels shape-shifting, as if it, too, has been stripped of formal weight.
What makes “Dispossessed” significant is the honesty of its warning. It does not pretend that the shadow disappears once the soul walks into the light. The “bleak thing under the tree” remains. Ridge suggests that liberation is an ongoing act of looking away, of bathing in “pools of light” and “sun-spray falling like golden rain” even while something grey waits in the shade. That combination of ecstatic movement and withheld grief gives the poem its strange power. Dispossession is not a clean escape; it is a discipline. For Ridge, who spent her career writing about people stripped by poverty and industrial life, the poem offers a vision of what such stripping might make possible: a soul light enough to ride the wind, if only it refuses to become stone again.