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PARTISAN REVIEW
Then Paterson "shifts his change," and an earthquake and a "remark–
able rumbling noise" frighten but do not damage the city-this is told
in the prose of an old newspaper account; and, at the end of the poem,
he stands in the flickering green of the cavern under the waterfall (the
dark, skulled world of consciousness) , hedged in by the pouring torrent
whose thunder drowns out any language; "the myth/ that holds up the
rock,/ that holds up the water thrives there-/ in that cavern, that pro–
found cleft"; and the readers of the poem are shown, in the last words
of the poem,
standing, shrouded there, in that din,
Earth, the chatterer, father of all
speech
. ...
It takes several readings to work out the poem's argument (it is a
poem that
must
be read over and over), and it seemed to me that I
could do most for its readers by roughly summarizing that argument.
There are hundreds of things in the poem that deserve specific mention.
The poem is weakest in the middle of Part III-I'd give page numbers
if good old New Directions had remembered to put in any-but this is
understandable and almost inevitable. Everything in the poem is inter–
woven with everything else, just as the strands of the Falls interlace: how
wonderful and unlikely that this extraordinary mixture of the most
delicate lyricism of perception and feeling with the hardest and homeliest
actuality should ever have come into being! There has never been a
poem more American (though the only influence one sees in it is that of
the river scene from
Finnegans Wake)
; if the next three. books are as
good as this one, which introduces "the elemental character of the place,"
the whole poem will be far and away the best long poem any American
has written. I should like to write a whole article about it; I leave it un–
willingly.
The best poems in Elizabeth Bishop's
North and South
are so good
that it takes a geological event like
Paterson
to overshadow them; "The
Fish" and "Roosters" are two of the most calmly beautiful, deeply sym–
pathetic poems of our time. "The Monument," ."The Man-Moth," "The
Weed," the first "Song for a Colored Singer," and one or two others are
extremely fine; and there are charming poems on a smaller scale, or
beautiful fragments- for instance, the end of "Love Lies Sleeping." Miss
Bishop is capable of the most outlandish ingenuity-who else could have
made a witty mirror-image poem out of the fact that we are bilateral–
ly symmetrical?-but is grave, calm, and tender at the same time. It is
odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when
the average literate poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde
than weep over them like Swinburne (or else do both at the same time,
like Kenneth Patchen), and when many a poem is gruesome occupa-
