Paterson

The beginning of Book 4 intersperses verse about a caretaker, Phyllis, who is the companion of Corydon, with letters from Phyllis to her father in which she complains about the caretaking and exhorts her father to stop drinking alcohol. Corydon and Phyllis discuss the city of Paterson; Paterson is also the name of Phyllis’s married lover, who Phyllis meets for trysts and tells about fly-fishing with her father and steady boyfriend. Phyllis writes to her father and threatens to not come home until he’s stopped drinking alcohol completely. Corydon reads Phyllis some of her poetry and invites her to spend a month in the woods together. Her poetry incorporates images of the natural landscape as well as of the city as a river. Paterson and Phyllis have a tryst in which she tells him she’s going away with Corydon.

A father takes his son to a lecture on atomic fission in the hopes he will develop an interest in it. A verse section intersperses imagery of Paris at dawn with the consideration of nuclear fission and relates that fission to sexuality as well as pregnancy. A case report details a nurse with salmonella.

Young poet A.G. writes a letter to Doctor Paterson with some poems (including about the city of Paterson) enclosed. He has just moved back to his hometown, Paterson the city, and hopes for professional assistance. Later in Book 4, A.G. writes again to Doctor Paterson, describing how he has found a job at a newspaper in Newark, New Jersey, and has been exploring a bar-heavy neighborhood in the city of Paterson. A historical interlude—this one in verse—describes the streets of Revolutionary War-era Paterson.

An advertisement advocating for national finance reform also argues for the production of more airplanes. The verse sections shift gears and connect nuclear power with the cost of healthcare in Williams’s day, and then with systems of money, credit, and finance more generally. A historical interlude describes a man killed by British soldiers with bayonets in his own bed at the very beginning of the Revolutionary War.

A hotel desk manager offers his apartment key to a strange woman to pick out a book to read, and when he returns home he finds her naked in his bed. They nap together. The narrator considers women he has known, as well as his exes. A historical interlude describes the discovery of the previously unknown location of “Peter the Dwarf's” grave. A verse section describes a Sandby watercolor of Passaic Falls, which illustrates Totowa Native Americans living alongside Dutch settlers. Paul Sandby is often considered the “Father of Watercolor.”

A newspaper article describes a violent infanticide in Paterson by the baby’s father. Verse continues with a listing of street names in 19th-century Paterson and descriptions of where businesses were located, some with views of Passaic Falls. A historical interlude describes the murder of a couple, the Van Winkles. The man accused of killing them is taken to the scene of the crime but cannot (or does not) remember participating; he is publicly executed. In poetic lines, the narrator connects the crime to the ocean and to images from Greek mythology.