William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 223It was the Emersonian-Whitmanian transcendental tradition to reject books
(and the past) when experience itself offered directly what the books could
offer only indirectly. Williams clearly places himself in this tradition.
Beautiful Thing appears (as we noted above) in numerous
incarnations in Paterson,but perhaps receives her apotheosis in Book V in the
fused vision of the virgin and the whore. “The moral / proclaimed by the
whorehouse / could not be better proclaimed / by the virgin, a price on her
head, / her maidenhead!” (P,p. 208). Again: “The whore and the virgin, an
identity: / —through its disguises” (P,p. 210). And again: “the virgin and the
whore, which / most endures? the world / of the imagination most endures”
(P,p. 213). The Unicorn legend woven into the tapestries of the Cloisters
invites this fusion of identities, as it brought together both religious and
secular meanings, the Unicorn itself representing Christ, but also, with his
phallic horn, the lover-bridegroom. Thus the poet allies himself to a long
tradition in seeing the two designations—virgin and whore—based on a
single identification of sexuality, evocative of fundamentally identical creative
sexual energy: “every married man carries in his head / the beloved and
sacred image / of a virgin / whom he has whored” (P,p. 234). And he can
assert paradoxically: “no woman is virtuous / who does not give herself to her
lover / —forthwith” (P,p. 229).
In Part Two of Book V of Patersonthere appears what seems to be
an independent poem, beginning:
There is a woman in our town
walks rapidly, flat bellied
in worn slacks upon the street
where I saw her.
neither short
nor tall, nor old nor young
her
face would attract no
adolescent.
(P,p. 219)This woman could be Beautiful Thing in another guise. Her appearance is
not extraordinary, but her effect on the poet is: “She stopped / me in my
tracks—until I saw / her / disappear in the crowd.” And he exclaims, “if ever
I see you again / as I have sought you / daily without success / I’ll speak to
you, alas / too late!” The poem might be read as an updated version of a
Whitman “Children of Adam” poem (“A Woman Waits for Me,” perhaps),