494
PARTISAN REVIEW
midst of all the confusion and ugliness in which men could not exist
except for "imagined beauty where there is none": so he says in disgust,
"Stale as a whale's breath: breath! / Breath!" and ten lines later (during
which three themes have been repeated and two of them joined at last
in a "silent, uncommunicative," and satisfying resolution) he says that
he has
Only of late, late! begun to know, to
know clearly (as through clear ice) whence
I draw my breath or how to employ it
clearly-if not well:
Clearly!
speaks the red-breast his behest. Clearly!
clearly!
These double exclamations have so prepared for the bird's call that
it strikes you, when you are reading the poem, like the blow which dis–
solves an enchantment. And really the preparation has been even more
complicated: two pages before there was the line " divorce! divorce!"
and half a page before the birds and weeds by the river were introduced
by
. ..
white, in
the shadows among the blue-flowered
Pickerel-weed, in summer, summer! if it should
ever come
...
If
you want to write a long poem which doesn't stick to one subject, but
which unifies a dozen, you can learn a great deal from
Paterson.
But I
do not know how important these details of structure will seem to an
age which regards as a triumph of organization that throwing-out-of–
blocks-upon-the-nursery-floor which concludes
The Waste Land,
and
which explains its admiration by the humorless literalness of believing
that a poet represents fragments by eliminating metre, connectives, and
logic from the verses which describe the fragments.
The subject of
Paterson
is: How can you tell the truth about things?
-that is, how can you find a language so close to the world that the
world can be represented and understood in it?
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 water filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he per-sists
incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.
