soft babble

[Image source: https://filmforum.org/film/hester-street-film-2017 . Carol Kane as Gitl in the 1974 movie Hester Street, directed by Joan Micklin Silver. Based on the 1896 novel Yekl, A Tale of the New York Ghetto by Abraham Cahan.]

 

Or spits her fire out in some dim manger of a hall,

Or at a protest meeting on the Square,

Her lit eyes kindling the mob . . .

Or dances madly at a festival.

Each dawn finds her a little whiter,

Though up and keyed to the long day,

Alert, yet weary . . . like a bird

That all night long has beat about a light.

The Gentile lover that she charms and shrews,

Is one more pebble in the pack

For Sadie's mother,

Who greets him with her narrowed eyes

That hold some welcome back.

"What's to be done?" she'll say,

"When Sadie wants she takes . . .

Better than Bennie with his Christian woman . . .

A man is not so like, 

If they should fight,

To call her Jew . . ."

Yet when she lies in bed

And the soft babble of their talk comes to her

And the silences . . .

I know she never sleeps

Till the keen draught blowing up the empty hall

Edges through her transom

And she hears his foot on the first stairs.

(from the title poem of The Ghetto, and other poems by Lola Ridge (1918)).

transom = transom light, i.e. the window above the door, which could be opened to provide cross-ventilation using a transom operator (wand-like assembly). 

This poem is set in Hester Street, Lower East Side.

Part of the excitement, aside from the mere fact that this poem of the Lower East Side exists, but part of the excitement in this early poetry (her first collection) is that her language and practice are all over the place. Lola Ridge resisted any kind of control, she was an anarchist and some of that gets into the language, there's no rules. And not being in control it runs a gamut from arch literariness to sharp originality to genre cliché. 

Inappropriate as it would be, it's not impossible that this ghetto is echoing Tennyson's brook of 1886.

I chatter over stony ways,

   In little sharps and trebles,

I bubble into eddying bays,

   I babble on the pebbles.

My ear snagged on the expression "soft babble" -- the rest of this post, I should explain, isn't about Lola Ridge. It snagged for the embarrassing reason that I remembered using it myself in an old flailing poem. Is it an expression, I mean a fixed form, or is it just two words that are capable of coming together? Anyway, I did a search for it. It's virtually always used in the context of water or human voices.

The earliest I could find was this review in The American Monthly, Vol 2 No 2 (February 1861).

A MAN. By REV. J. D. BELL. 12mo., pp. 642. Philadelphia, J. Challen & Son, 1860.

  Here is a book that we like.

  We have been fond of this writer for a long while. We snuffed the same Ontario breezes in infancy. We have rejoiced on the same unbounded prairies, and dreamed and wondered in the same infinite forest solitudes, and, though we know not each other, are not strangers. Under brown old oaks by the drowsy babble of brooks in the sunny west have we lain poring through slumbrous summer afternoons upon the soft babble of waves, and the earnest, fiery, yet tender, sometimes almost sad pages of John Bell. But this is a vigorous book, a healthy book . . .

Elsewhere in the same number, an article on measles notes that it isn't really a dangerous disease so long as it's well treated. Convalescence is critical: the patient must stay indoors, avoiding draughts. No washing and no exercise: sudden changes of temperature are the main risk. 

The religious department published its views on divine providence, "the more readily now, because, in the crisis that is upon our nation, men's hearts are failing them for fear, and they need to be reminded of the grand and consoling truths contained in this doctrine".

Another article is headed SECESSION:

The stirring drama of secession is likely soon to open another scene in the fearful drama of civil war. 

   A people so utterly at the mercy of a reckless mob, so blind to their own interests, so deluded in their estimate of their own powers, and so deceived in regard to those whom they oppose, it is folly to expect will exercise either common sense or forbearance. If a war is prevented, it will be owing solely to the cool forbearance of the North . . .

The author was coming from a religious position:

The truth is, God is speaking to the world in vindication of His own law and the claims of humanity, and producing a witness in the current history of our land, whose testimony shall extort a verdict from all nations, fully exonerating His religion from complicity in the "accursed thing". . .

It was leading him to prefer war to humiliation ( the war began two months later). 

The good neighbors began to go home when they had taken their tea, and the rector and his daughter went with them to the gate, when there was a soft babble and commotion of good nights, and every two people repeated to each other, "What a lovely moon!" and "What a glorious night!"

A Rose in June, by Mrs Oliphant (Boston, 1874). Margaret Oliphant was a prolific Scottish novelist.

While those sweet mingled strains have filled the room, Jeva in thought has been away in the quiet woods . . . . she has heard the soft babble of the brook, tinkling over the pebbles and whispering by the grasses.

Aunt Hepsy's Foundling, by Mrs Leith Adams (London, 1884). Novel set in New Brunswick. 

UK band Palomica's album Incoherencies and soft babble (Seaford/Bristol 2015/2016)

https://palomica.bandcamp.com/album/incoherencies-and-soft-babble

Flat calm, soft babble, rushing current or thundering rapids, an individual river can change its own mood and character on any given day.

https://americasgreatoutdoors.tumblr.com/post/630423192997085185/flat-calm-soft-babble-rushing-current-or

An earlier post on Lola Ridge:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/11/of-fields-before-i-had-had-my-milk.html