Paterson

“the city

the man, an identity—it can’t be

otherwise—an

interpenetration, both ways”

In these lines, Williams explicitly describes the relationship between Paterson the man and Paterson the city. Instead of one being part of the other, he describes the two as an “interpenetration” of both. Williams is personifying the city.

“...never in this world

will a man live well in his body

save dying—and not know himself

dying; yet that is

the design. Renews himself

thereby, in addition and subtraction,

walking up and down”

Williams connects a man living inside his own body to the Peripatetic philosophy; this Everyman renews his body through walking. This passage foreshadows Paterson’s walk through the park in Book 2 and connects to Transcendentalist ideas explored elsewhere in his text.

“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!”

This passage directly connects the body of Paterson the man with the city of Paterson. The most direct connection is drawn here between Paterson’s spine and the outline of Passaic Falls, which has a rocky landscape much like vertebrae. This quote is an excellent example of the artistic idea of the bodyscape which recurs throughout the book.

“A man like a city and a woman like a flower

—who are in love. Two women. Three women.

Innumerable women, each like a flower.

But

only one man—like a city”

In this passage, Williams relates the relationship between men and women to the space of the city. He sees this relationship as being both sexual and romantic, as a recurrent theme throughout the book. This section opens up the space for a feminist reading of the text, especially with regards to why it is primarily or solely men who thrive in the space of the city.

“with the roar of the river

forever in our ears (arrears)

inducing sleep and silence, the roar

of eternal sleep… challenging

our waking”

The wordplay present in this quote demonstrates Williams’s use of Imagist principles. There’s a playful quality present, especially concerning the sight of words inside one another. Through sonic imagery, he connects the river from Passaic Falls with the movement of liquids inside the human body.

“a body found next spring

frozen in an ice-cake; or a body

fished next day from the muddy swirl”

It is not only through living bodies that the human form is connected to water. Here, Williams demonstrates through concrete imagery how people are connected to the river even after death.

“We sit and talk,

quietly, with long lapses of silence

and I am aware of the stream

that has no language, coursing

beneath the quiet heaven of

your eyes”

Through the personification of the stream, Williams deepens the connection between the body and the landscape (the bodyscape). Here, he does so through an intimate experience between two lovers.

“And the myth

that holds up the rock,

that holds up the water thrives there...//

Earth, the chatterer, father of all

speech”

In this passage, Williams connects the landscape with the idea of language. Instead of emanating from an unknown source, here words themselves come directly from the Earth. Language is a prominent motif in the poem.

“Walking—

he leaves the path, finds hard going

cross-field, stubble and matted brambles

seeming a pasture—but no pasture

—old furrows, to say labor sweated or

had sweated here

a flame,

spent.”

Williams explores the human impact of labor upon the landscape. Much in the vein of fellow poet Walt Whitman, his particular focus is on the working-class connection to the land itself through the hard work of digging furrows for agricultural use. Additionally, this passage foreshadows the fire imagery of Book 3 through its discussion of what’s left behind in the fire’s wake.

“without invention the line

will never again take on its ancient

divisions when the word, a supple word,

lived in it, crumbled now to chalk”

In this passage, Williams connects the future of Imagist poetry to the history of place. In Paterson’s psychogeography, lines of poetry run through a field in the park.

“—the leg raised, verisimilitude

even to the coarse contours of the leg...

The leer, the cave of it,

the female of it facing the male, the satyr—

(Priapus!)

with that lonely implication, goatherd

and goat, fertility”

Williams references Greek mythology in this passage through the figure of Priapus. As a deity associated directly with fertility, Priapus is used here in an explicitly sexual context. The physicality of the leg and imagery of the cave once again connect the human body to the landscape.

“In other words, the Federal Reserve Banks constitute a Legalized National Usury System, whose Customer No. 1 is our Government, the richest country in the world. Every one of us is paying tribute to the money racketeers on every dollar we earn through hard work”

Williams discusses the American financial system. In particular, he weighs the moral and ethical values of the Federal Reserve System through the figure of a park preacher. The negative implications of financial policy are under particular scrutiny.

“Books will give rest sometimes against

the uproar of water falling

and righting itself to refall filling

the mind with its reverberation”

Williams returns here to a discussion of the worth and use of language through sensory detail and evocative imagery of a waterfall. The cascade of a waterfall—likely Passaic Falls—evokes the fall of knowledge from a book into the mind through the act of reading.

“The province of the poem is the world.

When the sun rises, it rises in the poem

and when it sets darkness comes down

and the poem is dark”

In this quote, Williams sets out a relationship between the text of a poem and the natural world. In it, he draws a direct connection between the rise and set of the sun in the physical space of the landscape as compared to the figurative landscape of the poem.

“Sing me a song to make death tolerable, a song

of a man and a woman: the riddle of a man

and a woman.”

In this passage, Williams evokes the first line of The Odyssey, especially with “sing me a song.” He uses repetition and figurative imagery to connect the poetry of song with an image of romance.

“Fire burns; that is the first law.

When a wind fans it the flames

are carried abroad. Talk

fans the flames. They have

maneuvered it so that to write

is a fire and not only of the blood”

In this quote, Williams compares the natural law of combustion to the purpose and the effect of poetry. As an Imagist, he frequently uses strong imagery to underscore abstract intellectual points. Here, he uses the destruction and power of fire as a metaphor for the power of language.

“We read: not the flames

but the ruin left

by the conflagration

Not the enormous burning

but the dead (the books

remaining)”

Using the second-person point-of-view, here Williams describes a literal erasure of language. The library is burned, and instead of reading the books which went up in flames, those who remain read “the ruin left” from “the dead”.

“The ears are water. The feet

listen. Boney fish bearing lights

stalk the eyes”

In this passage, Williams uses an undersea metaphor to riff on the connection of the human body to the landscape. Instead of body parts being like the ocean, they become the ocean. This passage also signifies a shift in the book: movement from a mountainous green landscape to an oceanic one.

“Texts mount and complicate them-

selves, lead to further texts and those

to synopses, digests and emendations. So be it.

Until the words break loose or—sadly

hold, unshaken. Unshaken!”

This quotation directly contrasts the perceived static quality of writing—especially of literature—with the movement of texts. In particular, this passage demonstrates an illusion to a metatextual quality found throughout Paterson—of Williams writing about writing.

“You mentioned a city?

Paterson, where I trained

Paterson!

Yes, of course.”

This passage demonstrates polyvocality in verse through the characters of Phyllis and Cordon, who are a caretaker and her charge. The back-and-forth of their speech is lineated here as it might be in dialogue in a short story or play.

“Oh Paterson! Oh married man!

He is the city of cheap hotels and private

entrances of taxis at the door, the car

standing in the rain hour after hour by

the roadhouse entrance”

This quotation directly ties Paterson the man and Paterson the city together. In Book 4, there’s a turn in Paterson’s character when he begins an extramarital affair. This affair is foreshadowed in the innate attention paid to sexuality which is focalized through his character in Book 3.

“Q: Well—is it poetry?

A: We poets have to talk in a language which is not English. It is the American idiom. Rhythmically it’s organized as a sample of the American idiom. It has as much originality as jazz. If you say ‘2 partridges, 2 mallard ducks, a Dungeness crab’—if you treat that rhythmically, ignoring the practical sense, it forms a jagged pattern. It is, to my mind, poetry.”

Williams uses his narrator to explain his definition of poetry. As a leading figure of the Imagist artistic movement, Williams was dedicated to modernizing what he saw as the staid conservatism of other contemporary poetry. Here, he connects poetry as a craft to a deeply American identity.

“Paterson has grown older

the dog of his thoughts

has shrunk

to no more than a ‘passionate letter’

to a woman, a woman he had neglected

to put to bed in the past”

Time passes over the course of the book, and Paterson ages. Because of his age, the roving sexuality of his youth has retracted to passionate letters and wordplay. This section references the thematic considerations of sexuality (especially heterosexuality) which recur throughout all five books, as well as Paterson’s changing role within it.