32 pages • 1 hour read
William Carlos WilliamsPaterson
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1 Summary
In Book 1, which was originally published as a separate volume in 1946, William Carlos Williams introduces the main characters and themes which will recur throughout the rest of the text. The eponymous Paterson is the name both of a man and of a city in New Jersey, and throughout this section Williams draws connections between them: “the city / the man, an identity—it can’t be / otherwise—an / interpenetration, both ways” (3). Book 1 uses evocative imagery to create these connections, especially imagery of the body as landscape. Passaic Falls is introduced as the headwaters whose torrent creates a river that can be dangerous.
This section is collaged with verse poetry, letters, and stories about the inhabitants of Paterson throughout time; notably a poor shoemaker who discovers pearls in mussels, a man with an unusually long forehead visited by General Washington of the Revolutionary Army, a group of boys catching an enormous fish, the history of a mixed-race region called New Barbadoes Neck. Williams tells the story of Mrs. Sarah Cummings, who falls into the river below Passaic Falls and drowns. Next, he describes Sam Patch, a townsperson with substance use disorder who jumps into the falls as the town tries to raise a bridge to span the gap and later drowns jumping into Niagara Falls. Cummings and Patch’s bodies are found only later.
Paterson the person observes the city which shares his name from various angles, including as he moves through the cityscape and from inside a bus. As a first-person narrator, Paterson relates a kinship with the landscape; this kinship does not have a clear separation from his personhood. The narrator moves into a lyrical register with images of marriage, beds, and the river. Later, he meditates on the aging process and the nature of time passing. A third-person narrator relates the story of a pediatrician getting the label off a mayo jar in which a patient has provided a urine sample; men and boys of the town harvest huge eels from a lake at night; Leonard Sanford of the water company finds a body in the river.
The narrator explores connections here between the birth of language, ecology, and humanity, especially regarding the scope and breadth of the human lifespan. In the latter half of this book, Paterson uses romantic imagery, including of the marital bed as the bed of a stream, to demonstrate the closeness of this connection.
Book 1 Analysis
In Book 1, Williams introduces the collaging and mosaic structure which will recur throughout the rest of the book. The mosaic structure allows for many small parts of the narrative to form a larger picture of the city. Instead of writing simply a collection of poems, or a collection of stories, he intersperses sections of each with other types of writing related to the city of Paterson and main narrative arcs. The main types of writing that Williams uses are historical interludes that detail specific events that happened in the city, verse poems that use imagery to connect disparate ideas, epistolary letters from one character to another, and free indirect narration primarily from the character of Paterson. The flattening of time through the use of the historical interludes allows Williams to consider thematic connections rather than simply chronological ones.
One thematic connection Williams makes is between the body and the landscape (termed bodyscape). This connection occurs at length and in the most detail through the character of Paterson, who is deeply entwined through his name with the city of Paterson and Passaic Falls, the waterfall at which the river through the city begins: “Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls / its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He / lies on his right side, head near the thunder / of the waters filling his dreams!” (6). Williams uses personification to enhance the connection between humans and the natural world, especially in verse such as “the stream / that has no language, coursing / beneath the quiet heaven of / your eyes (24).
However, Williams also makes that connection between the body and the landscape through the death of characters such as Mrs. Cummings and Sam Patch, who because they die in the river, become the landscape more literally. Williams describes them as “a body found next spring / frozen in an ice-cake; or a body / fished next day from the muddy swirl” (20); by describing them as merely bodies it is as though they have always been part of the landscape rather than accidentally killed by it.
Book 1 is written in Williams’s variable-foot free verse without perfect consistency in the length, meter, or rhyme of the lines. He sometimes uses an internal perfect rhyme scheme to repeat specific word-sounds and create connections between different lines of text. At the end of Book 1, Williams quotes from Studies of the Greek Poets by John Addington Symonds about deformed metrical verse, and he connects this pattern to a sense of deformed morality—ironic considering his own use of an inconsistent line form and pattern.
Related Titles
By William Carlos Williams
