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

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