Modern American Poetry

William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 207

is the meaning of the “meaningless” flow of events in the voiceless currents of
ceaseless experience? Book I concludes: “Earth, the chatterer, father of all /
speech.” The poet struggles to unstop his stone ear.

4

Readers of Paterson quickly realize that they are not reading a
traditional narrative, but they soon begin to catch glimpses of a fugitive
narrative. Paterson’s journey through the local does, finally, reach some kind
of awareness. And the arrangements of the books of Patersonrepresent to
some extent stages on that journey to awareness. The form is open-ended
inasmuch as such journeys are never concluded until the death of the poet;
thus Patersonhas its concluding fragments, just as The Cantoshas its and
Leaves of Grassthe Annexes. But the open-endedness does not preclude
conclusion. In a sense, each book of Patersonis a conclusion, and the first four
books especially lead to a conclusion, but Book V carries the reader further
along to another stage in the poet-Paterson’s insight or vision, combing
further the language of the falls.
There are abundant suggestions of an elemental organization of
Paterson,especially in the various descriptions that Williams drew up for the
poem. One of the earliest available of these is the poem, “Paterson: The
Falls,” which appeared in the 1944 volume, The Wedge:

What common language to unravel?

The Falls, combed into straight lines

from the rafter of a rock’s

lip. Strike in! the middle of

some trenchant phrase, some

well packed clause. Then ...

This is my plan. 4 sections:

(CLP,p. 10)

The poem’s remaining eight stanzas give an outline of the poem as Williams
planned it. “First, / the archaic persons of the drama.” Here will be “an
eternity of bird and bush,” and “an unraveling: / the confused streams
aligned, side / by side, speaking!” Next, “The wild / voice of the shirt-sleeved
/ Evangelist rivaling,” his voice “echoing / among the bass and pickerel.” And
then, “Third, the old town: Alexander Hamilton / working up from St.
Croix,” but “stopped cold / by that unmoving roar.” And finally,