496
PA RTT
SA N
1
RE
V I
EW
only: "Some things can be done as well as others"; and Mrs. Cumming,
the minister's wife, shrieked unheard and fell unseen from the brink;
and the two were only
a body found next spring
frozen in an ice-cake; or a body
fished next day from the muddy swirl-
both silent, uncommunicative.
The speech of sexual understanding, of natural love, is represented by
three beautifully developed themes: a photograph of the nine wives of a
Negro chief; a tree standing on the brink of the waterfall; and two
lovers talking by the river:
We sit and talk and the
silence speaks of the giants
who have died in the past and have
returned to those scenes unsatisfied
and who is not unsatisfied, the
silent, Singac the rock-shoulder
emerging from the rocks-and the giants
live again in your silence and
unacknowledged desire
. . .
But now the air by the river "brings in the rumors of separate worlds,"
and the poem is dragged from its highest point in the natural world,
from the early, fresh, and green years of the city, into the slums of Pater–
son, into the collapse of this natural language, into "a delirium of solu–
tions," into the back streets of that "great belly/ that no longer laughs
but mourns/ with its expressionless black navel love's/ deceit." Here is
the whole failure of Paterson's ideas and speech, and he is forced to
begin all over; Part II of the poem ends with the ominous "No ideas
but/ in the facts."
Part III opens with this beautiful and unexpected passage:
How strange you are, you idiot!
So you think because the rose
is red that you shall have the mastery?.
The rose is green and will bloom,
o1;ertopping you, green, livid
green when you shall no more speak, or
taste, or even be. My whole life
has hung too long upon a partial victory.
