158 PA RT T W O
epic Williams worked on for twenty years, trying like Thoreau and Whitman
to turn up fertile soil for American consciousness and conscience.
Paterson opens where Passaic Falls originates from
oozy fields
abandoned to grey beds of dead grass,
black sumac, withered weed-stalks,
mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves
—originates, that is, from a wasteland, like Spring and All’s road to the conta-
gious hospital. But instead of Eliot ’s “dry stone” and “thunder without rain,”
here the falls pour down their gorge “in a recoil of spray and rainbow mist” into
a page-long torrent of verse. At the brink these waters, “glass-smooth with their
swiftness, / quiet or seem to quiet.” Then, fusing violence and quiescence, they
fall, fall in air! as if
floating, relieved of their weight,
split apart, ribbons; dazed, drunk
with the catastrophe of the descent
floating unsupported
to hit the rocks: to a thunder,
as if lightning had struckWatching waterfalls at a distance, that sense we get of massive force simply
floating downward has brought this spellbound potency out of oozy fields and
dead grass.
Passaic Falls’ raw energy speaks for chosen ground, the local place turned
universal through a poet ’s deep regard. The family doctor thinks of Paterson’s
decaying families:
The language, the language
fails them...
They may look at the torrent in
their minds
and it is foreign to them.He lends his mind ’s eye to catch life aflow but not lost, held in the Falls’
unmoving roar, fastened
there: the rocks silent
but the water, married to the stone,
voluble, though frozen.Whatever became of those families, Williams’s Autobiography closes with him
taking his grandson to hear the Falls “let out a roar as it crashed upon the rocks
at its base. In the imagination this roar is a speech or a voice.... It is the poem
itself that is the answer.”