Modern American Poetry

(^224) James E. Miller, Jr.
and the poet adds at the end: “have you read anything that I have written? /
It is all for you” (P,pp. 255–56).
Beautiful Thing, sexual-creative energy, the phallic-priapus principle,
love against death: these themes intermingle and become vital in Paterson,
culminating in Book V: “The Unicorn roams the forest of all true lovers’s
minds. They hunt it down. Bow wow! sing hey the green holly!” (P,p. 234).
The poet admonishes himself: “Paterson, / keep your pecker up / whatever
the detail!” (P,p. 235). Sexuality and creativity, like the virgin and whore,
fuse, and the energy of the “pecker” is as important to creating poetry as for
making love. For “to measure is all we know, / a choice among the measures
/.. / the measured dance.” And this “measure” is made up of the eternal satyr
in man as well as the eternally tragic—“to dance to a measure /
contrapuntally, / Satyrically, the tragic foot” (P,p. 239).
7
Paterson’s search for a redeeming language turns up a language of
redemption, but it is a delicate thread winding its way through the poem. In
the first book the emphasis is on descent, as Paterson himself identifies with
Sam Patch in his leap into Passaic Falls, ending up in a cake of ice. Paterson
hovers near the edge—
The thought returns: Why have I not
but for imagined beauty where there is none
or none available, long since
put myself deliberately in the way of death?
(P,p. 20)
The imagination as man’s redeemer? Possibly, as we shall see in Book V. But
meanwhile, the nul and the descent must be faced. Part Three of Book II
opens with the admonition: “Look for the nul / defeats it all.” This “nul” is
“the N of all / equations,” “the blank / that holds them up.” It is “that nul /
that’s past all seeing / the death of all that’s past / all being” (P,p. 77). This
blankness and nullity appear to be very close to that palsied whiteness that
Melville’s Ishmael (in Moby-Dick) saw in the heart of all matter, the whiteness
that “shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and
thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation.”^18
Then Paterson suddenly breaks off from contemplation of the nul:
“But Spring shall come and flowers will bloom / and man must chatter of
his doom.” This is self-admonition, a turning away from abstract ideas of