Modern American Poetry

William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 213

of eternal sleep ... challenging

our waking—

(P,p. 18)

This divorce is a severance from the fruition of life itself. In divorce “from
its fellows,” the bud remains “forever green.” Thus Williams suggests a
profound immaturity characteristic of America, with the energy and
potential present but unrealized. And the divorce is clearly related to the
“roar” which communicates nothing but its uncombed sound, rendering
genuine human connection difficult if not impossible. Life roars by and
leaves nothing in its wake but a trailing silence, “the roar / of eternal sleep,”
death, the final and lasting divorce.
In Book II of Paterson,the poet-protagonist’s Sunday walk through
the park brings into focus some of the causes of blockage and divorce. There
is, first of all, the people—Alexander Hamilton’s “great beast”—coarsened by
a life of hard work:

... the ugly legs of the young girls,

pistons too powerful for delicacy!

the men’s arms, red, used to heat and cold,

to toss quartered beeves and.

(P,p. 44)

Their Sunday relaxation suggests the nature of the other days of their
lives—days in the factories and businesses of Paterson earning the money
for survival. In what is potentially an Eliotic Waste Landscene, the “great
beast” of the people ignoring the traditional meaning of Sunday and
wasting their time in meaningless activities, drinking beer, playing ball,
quarreling and napping, we encounter a vision closer to Whitman’s than to
Eliot’s: there is sympathy and understanding and searching as Paterson
walks through the park. “Cash is mulct of them that others may live /
secure /.. and knowledge restricted” (P,p. 72). A significant part of the
poet’s vision comes in a prose passage: “Even during the Revolution
Hamilton had been impressed by the site of the Great Falls of the Passaic.
His fertile imagination envisioned a great manufacturing center, a great
Federal City, to supply the needs of the country. Here was water-power to
turn the mill wheels and the navigable river to carry manufactured goods
to the market centers: a national manufactury” (P,p. 69). Williams had
been attracted to Paterson and its Passaic Falls precisely because of
Hamilton’s historical involvement, his vision of great material wealth,