Modern American Poetry

(^220) James E. Miller, Jr.
Sees, alive (asleep)
—the fall’s roar entering
his sleep (to be fulfilled)
reborn
in his sleep—scattered over the mountain
severally
—by which he woos her, severally.
(P,p. 60)
Later in the day, Paterson passes by once again and notices that “the drunken
lovers slept, now, both of them” (P,p. 62).
Later, after listening to the evangelist Klaus, Paterson ponders and
puzzles over beauty—“These women are not / beautiful and reflect / no
beauty but gross.. / Unless it is beauty / to be, anywhere, / so flagrant in
desire” (P,p. 71). Unless, unless.Before presenting the frustrated Sunday park
lovers, Paterson remembered a scene from an Eisenstein film in which an old
peasant is drinking with abandon in a kind of sexual celebration: “the female
of it facing the male, the satyr— / (Priapus!)” (P,p. 58). The priapus principle
of life has been frustrated in the lovers in the park—but affirmed by the poet.
These lovers are not re-creations of Eliot’s typist and “young man
carbuncular,” but rather, perhaps, answers to them. Their desire is healthy
and life-affirming, not sordid and meaningless. It is the beauty that the poet
seeks, and he works to “transpose” it there without falsifying or
sentimentalizing or satirizing. Many readers have been misled by this
passage, seeing it in the context of Eliot’s Waste Landview of sex. But
Williams has made it clear, both in the poem and out of it, that he is on the
side of the frustrated lovers. He remarked in 1954: “I was always concerned
with the plight of the young in the industrial age who are affected by love.
It’s a classic theme because a tragic theme—because love is much thought
about and written about. It’s tragedy when it is realized by an artist and
comes out in a form like this. I love the impassioned simplicity of young
lovers. When it’s thwarted, and they don’t know it’s thwarted, then the
vulgarity is lifted to distinction by being treated with the very greatest art
which I can conceive.” Williams saw the “love” scene as vital to the poem:
“It’s easy to miss, but the whole theme of Patersonis brought out in this
passage, the contrast between the mythic beauty of the Falls and Mountain
and the industrial hideousness.... so in this scene love has triumphed.”^17
Beauty locked in the mind—released.
In Book III, “The Library,” the quest for beauty surges to the fore,
flashing in Paterson’s (and the reader’s) mind in the strangely vague refrain,