Modern American Poetry

William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 229

We shall not get to the bottom:

death is a hole

in which we are all buried

Gentile and Jew.

The flower dies down

and rots away.

But there is a hole

in the bottom of the bag.

It is the imagination

which cannot be fathomed.

It is through this hole

we escape..

So through art alone, male and female, a field of

flowers, tapestry, spring flowers unequaled

in loveliness.

(P,pp. 211–12)

The descent of death is the final descent: but there are new spaces even here,

and a reversal of despair: the imagination finds the hole at the bottom of

death through which to escape—as the resurrected Unicorn has escaped in

the tapestry.

Through this hole

at the bottom of the cavern

of death, the imagination

escapes intact.

he bears a collar round his neck

hid in the bristling hair.

(P,p. 212)

Immediately following this defiant assertion appears a letter from the young,
then unknown poet Allen Ginsberg, setting out to dedicate his life to the
poetic imagination. The letter thanks Williams for writing his introduction
(to Howl!), and proclaims his “whitmanic mania”: “In any case Beauty is
where I hang my hat. And reality. And America” (P, p. 213). Williams-
Paterson’s Unicorn, perhaps? Redemption, resurrection, through the
imagination, of Whitman’s “ages’ and ages’ encrustations.” But of course,
Williams’s Unicorn of the seventh tapestry is the poem Patersonitself. It has
handsomely escaped through the hole at the bottom of death. And many