Open to the Weather 105and such diversely fresh things as the implicit image of “Young Sycamore,”
the descent through woods in “The Source,” the vitreous marine descent in
“The Cod Head,” the sardonic “scaleless / jumble” of “It is a Living Coral,”
and the brief transits of “Poem” and “Between Walls.”
Because such poems involve no very new structural principle or law of
vision, they do not require extended comment here. There are also, however,
three important steps toward more sustained sequence: the fragmentary
“Paterson” of 1927, a good deal of which would be incorporated in the later
Paterson; “The Descent of Winter,” a verse-and-prose sequence that
emerged from a diary-script of late 1927; and the poetic sequence that
followed, “Della Primavera Trasportata Al Morale.” In each of these poems
appear new lines of growth.
The texture of “Paterson” renders with meditative detachment that
central consciousness which is both man and city, one and many, self and
non-self, ideas and things. Its leisurely pace accommodates remarkably swift
changes of perspective, and its potential wholeness of vision consorts with an
honest ignorance. Williams here occupied the multidimensional position
that would make his later epic possible. However, “Paterson” contains no
really immediate voices. We hear no living people in this somnambulistic
city—not even the poet as actual man, suffering this condition and bringing
it to articulation.
In “The Descent of Winter” the diary organization gives us that actual
man. The Great American Novelhad already explored the possibilities of a
fiction in which the author would seem an immediate and improvisatory
presence, and Kora in Helland Spring and Allhad used seasonal frameworks.
Now Williams combined verse and prose in a sequence that locates us in the
day-by-day consciousness of the writer as one engaged in an actual descent
into local and therefore universal ground. We need not regard the unity
given by the entry-dates as “spurious” and merely criticize the poems as
separate pieces, even though Williams’ own later dismantling of the script
leaves the way open for such a procedure.^8
The structure of the whole, though quite imperfect, does give support
to its parts. There are frequent cross-references and illuminating
juxtapositions: the poems of 10/22, 10/28, and 10/29, for example, gain from
their prose context; and 11/2 (“A Morning Imagination of Russia”) is in the
following prose related to Charles Sheeler, Shakespeare, and the local
Fairfield.^9 The entire sequence may be seen as enacting a descent from auto-
erotic and barren isolation (9/27, 9/29) through expansive and fructifying
movements toward a new discovery of community, the past, love, and the
writer’s vocation as earlier known by the “fluid” and “accessible’’