Modern American Poetry

William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 227

Hell’s fire. Fire Sit your horny ass

down. What’s your game? Beat you

at your own game, Fire. Outlast you:

Poet Beats Fire at Its Own Game! The bottle!

the bottle! the bottle! the bottle! I

give you the bottle! What’s burning

now, Fire?

(P,p. 118)

It is the poet’s language of redemption that has beaten the fire at its own
game, turning destruction into creation, resurrecting (and preserving) the
bottle in its new incarnation.
In Book IV, Madame Curie’s discovery of radium constitutes a similar
reversal—

A dissonance

in the valence of Uranium

led to the discovery

Dissonance

(if you are interested)

leads to discovery

(P,p. l76)

At a critical moment in the Curie investigations, there appeared the nul, the
blankness—but

a stain at the bottom of the retort

without weight, a failure, a

nothing. And then, returning in the

night, to find it

LUMINOUS

(P,p. l78)

The luminosity derives from the assumed nothing—the blank space that
gave room for the new awakening.
The pattern of descent and renewal is the pattern of the central
action of the poem. Paterson takes on the identity of Sam Patch fallen to his
doom and encased in a cake of ice in the opening of the poem. If the doom
is final, Patch-Paterson should disappear in the sea at the end of the descent