William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 221“Beautiful Thing.” But the vagueness perhaps suits the poet’s purposes in
appearing rather common (and undistinguished) language but suggesting
reverberations that go beyond any specific attachment. The refrain has a
long history in the conception of Paterson.It appeared first at the end of the
Columbus chapter, “The Discovery of the Indies,” in In the American Grain
(1925): Columbus has sent his men off for water in the new land of his
discovery, and during the two hours he contemplates this new world:
“During that time I walked among the trees which was the most beautiful
thing which I had ever seen” (IAG,p. 26). Williams inserted this passage in
PatersonIV, ii (P,p. 178) (changing only the last word to known), himself
calling attention to the historic and national dimension of the refrain:
Beautiful Thing was there for the simple viewing, not locked away in the
mind, not hidden deep within the sordid surfaces—in the beginning of the
American experience. What had become of it (or what we had done to it) in
the centuries since was a different matter.
As we have already observed, Beautiful Thing figured centrally in
Williams’s 1937 poem, “Paterson: Episode 17,” and many of the passages of
this poem turn up in Book III of Paterson. The idea and the phrase
embodying it, then, seem to have been an important part of the poem’s
beginning. Throughout Book III, Beautiful Thing seems to be set over
against the library, offering a meaning and vitality that the books of the dead
past cannot match. The Beautiful Thing of the original poem is a beautiful
Negro servant girl, loved and violated by many, caught in the lively moment
of beating a rug. But in Patersonshe seems raised to mythic level—“tall / as
you already were— / till your head / through fruitful exaggeration / was
reaching the sky and the / prickles of its ecstasy / Beautiful Thing!” (P,pp.
126–27). In this role, she reaches back in the poem to Book I to connect with
the old (first) wife of the African chieftain of the National Geographicpicture
and to Book II to connect with the girl filled with frustrated desire in the
park; and she reaches forward in the poem to connect with Phyllis of the Idyl
and with Madame Curie (Book IV) and with the “whore and virgin” of Book
V: the mystery of woman, the mystery of sex, the mystery of love, the
mystery of creativity—themes of Whitman throughout Leaves of Grass,but
especially in the sex poems of “Children of Adam.”
For a time in Book III, Paterson seems to hold the “answer” in his
mind:
What end but love, that stares death in the eye?
A city, a marriage—that stares death
in the eye