BOOKS
491
The underlying green of the facts always cancels out the red in which
we had found our partial, temporary, aesthetic victory; and the poem
now introduces the livid green of the obstinate and compensating lives,
the lifeless perversions of the industrial city: here are the slums and the
adjoining estate with its acre hothouse and weedlike orchids and French
maid whose sole duty is to "groom/ the pet Pomeranian!-who sleep";
here is the university with its clerks
spitted on fixed concepts like
roasting hogs, sputtering, their drip sizzling
in the fire
Something else, something else the sam1.
Then (in one of the fine prose quotation!-much altered by the
poet,
surely-with which the verse is intersper5ed) people drain the lake there,
all day and all night long kill the eels and fish with sticks,
carry
them
away in baskets; there is nothing left but the mud. The sleeping Pater–
son, "moveless," envies the men who could run
off
"toward the peri–
pheries-to other centers, direct" for some ..loveliness and/ authority
in the world," who could leap like Sam Patch and be found "the fol–
lowing spring, frozen . in/ an ice cake." But he goes on thinking to the
very bitter end, reproduces all the ignorance and brutality of the city;
and he understands its pathos and horror:
And silk spins from the hot drums to a music
of pathetic souvenirs, a comb and nail-file
in an imitation leather cas1-to
remind him, to remind him! and
a photograph-holder with pictures of himself
between the two children, all returned
weeping, weeping-in the back room
of the widow who married again, a vile tongue
but laborious ways, driving a drunken
husband .
. .
Yet he contrasts his own real mystery, the mystery of people's actual lives,
with the mystery that "the convent of the Little Sisters of/ St.
Ann
pretends"; and he understands the people "wiping the nose on sleeves,
come here/ to dream"; he understands that
Things, things unmentionable
the sink with the waste farina in it and
lumps of rancid meat, milk-bottle-tops: have
here a still tranquillity and lov1liness
...
