Slightly delayed this week due to circumstances beyond my control, this one is called “Mother” and it’s by Lola Ridge.
You are less an image in my mind
Lola Ridge (1873—1941)
than a luster
I see you in gleams
pale as star-light on a gray wall…
evanescent as the reflection of a white swan
shimmering in broken water.
Poem 279. Mother
Your love was like moonlight
turning harsh things to beauty,
so that little wry souls
reflecting each other obliquely
as in cracked mirrors…
beheld in your luminous spirit
their own reflection,
transfigured as in a shining stream,
and loved you for what they are not.
You are less an image in my mind
than a luster
I see you in gleams
pale as star-light on a gray wall…
evanescent as the reflection of a white swan
shimmering in broken water.
This is a short modernist poem in which Lola Ridge writes touchingly about her mother, abandoning the traditional forms for free verse that nonetheless paints a luminous picture.
The narrator compares her mother’s love to the way moonlight softens and silvers everything it touches “turning harsh things to beauty” so that even “little wry souls”—wry meaning crooked in this context—that saw each other incompletely “as in cracked mirrors” could see themselves whole in her “luminous spirit” and love her perfection despite their own imperfections.
She remembers her mother as “a lustre” more than a specific image, as if all her memories are touched with the love her mother conferred on everything, like a filter on a digital picture, and her memories of her actual person are caught only in shards of fleeting recollections “evanescent as the reflection of a white swan/shimmering in broken water.
Whatever our feelings for our own mothers, not many of us have the talent to express them as eloquently and beautifully as Lola Ridge did. This is a gorgeous poem, with its references to the silvery moonlight, the luminosity of her mother’s spirit, and the way she conveys the impression of transient memories as a reflection of something beautiful in rippling water.
Links
- Read an analysis of the poem at Interesting Literature.
- Listen to an uncredited performance on Guy Mulinder’s channel on YouTube.