Modern American Poetry

William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 211

Book V: bridging the way from life to death; the Unicorn tapestries and
the immortal vision of art. Out of the tapestries at the Cloisters museum in
New York City, Paterson weaves a final poem of discovery beyond the
Paterson of Book IV: he discovers a “hole” through the bottom of death—
the imagination of art. But this book of death is filled with a lively life: the
life of love triumphant over blockage and divorce. Love walks the bridge of
imagination (and art) to and throughdeath. The poet advises himself (and his
reader), “keep your pecker up.” The book ends with the “measured dance,”
a dance of life made up (like the serpent with its tale in its mouth) of both the
joyous and the painful, of love and death; “dance to a measure / Satyrically,
the tragic foot.”
In this summary view of Paterson,much has leaked away that is vital to
the poem. But the overview might serve as the basis for a longitudinal
approach which will constitute a kind of combing out of the major languages
of the poems as they thread and entangle their way through all the books of
Paterson.Williams repeatedly asserted that his poem constituted a search for
a redeeming language. The question remains, Did he find it? The answer to
this question involves us in passages of the poem passed over in the above
summary view. Of the poem’s many languages, there is first and foremost the
Language of Chaos: there is the unmistakably less robust Language of
Beauty; and there is the more fragile Language of Redemption. As we comb
out these languages we shall simplify, but they will immediately re-entangle
themselves in the poem where they shall remain inviolate.

5

The loudest language of Patersonis the language of chaos, of criticism,

the language which the poet finds as the reality of Paterson, the reality of

America. Indeed, a first reading of the poem might well leave the impression

that it is the only language because it is so dominant. The voiceless

drownings of Sam Patch (who used the symbolic name of Noah Faitoute

Paterson, thus enabling the poet to identify with him) and Mrs. Cumming

offer a paradigm for a languageless, perishing America, suffering from

“blockage” (it’s there but it’s dammed up, blocked) and from “divorce,” a

failure of connecting humanly because of a failure of language. But the

Patch-Cumming episodes are only the most vivid of a large cluster of related

images of failure:

The language, the language

fails them