Modern American Poetry

(^218) James E. Miller, Jr.
Dreams possess me
and the dance
of my thoughts
involving animals
the blameless beasts
(P,p. 224)
Whitman said: “I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid
and self-contain’d, / I stand and look at them long and long.”^15 Paterson’s
dance, the dance of his thoughts and the dance that ends the poem, is a dance
of acceptance that embraces (as “all we know”) both the joyous and the
tragic.
6
Paterson’sPreface opens, “Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you
find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance” (P,p. 3). At
one time, Williams had added: “It is not in the things nearest us unless
transposed there by our employment.”^16 Language must be used in
explorations for beauty, and much of Patersonis given over to its discovery
and delineation, its tenuous embodiment in an elusive language. Paterson
does indeed find beauty in “the things nearest us,” but it is only by
employment of his art that it is “transposed there.”
The first extended probing for beauty comes in Book I, with minute
examination in memory of an old photograph from the National Geographic:
I remember
a Geographicpicture, the 9 women
of some African chief semi-naked
astraddle a log, an official log to
be presumed, head left:
(P,p. l3)
Paterson’s eye of memory moves from the youngest, most recent wife along
the line to the “last, the first wife, / present! supporting all the rest growing
up from her.” Her breasts sag “from hard use,” but on her face there is a
“vague smile, / unattached, floating like a pigeon / after a long flight to his
cote.” After presenting the examples of Sam Patch and Mrs. Cumming
(blockage and divorce), Paterson’s mind returns to this enigmatic woman: