二十世紀美國現代主義詩人威廉斯（William Carlos Williams）（1883-1963）雖然於他的詩作中屬意陳述在地實事，避免作品落入大敘述的框架之下，然而古典神話中的題材，依然可見於他的著作之中。在威廉斯的扛鼎巨作《裴特森》（Paterson）這部長詩裏，希臘神話中守護森林牧地的山林之神潘（Pan），便是此詩中鮮明且重要的意象。這部詩作不但諷刺人類與自然環境關係的脫離，亦指出語言與認同之間不可切割的關係。牧神潘介於人與非人之間的形象，除了表徵自然歷史與人類歷史的結合特質之外，同時說明了自然與非自然之間密不可分的關係。源此，本文旨在探討威廉斯詩作《裴特森》中所引喻之潘神的意象，並援以二十世紀晚期的激進環境理論「深度生態學」（deep ecology）的論點，分析威廉斯隱含於此詩中，對於1970 至1940 年間，美國北方小城的環境歷史所抱持的批判。

Although twentieth-century North American modernist poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was not a prolific borrower of classical myth and preferred instead to stick to local facts and avoid grand, overarching narratives, classical themes and subject matter do appear in his writings. An important figure is the nature deity Pan, a god of woodlands, vegetation, and forests, a protector of gardens, and a figure that often is associated with satyrs or depicted as a satyr. Pan makes a conspicuous appearance in Williams’s magnum opus, the long poem Paterson (1946-c.1961). This text, a satire on the subject of divorce between the human and environment, places side by side, on equal footing and in inseparable terms, human and nonhuman language and identity. Pan, a half-natural and half-unnatural, “unregenerate, potent”spokespiece for the nonhuman ecogenic world, lurks behind the text’s juxtaposition
of poetry and prose, natural history and human history, and characters that are a mixture-an “interpenetration, both ways” (Paterson 4)-of the nonhuman and the human. The argument of the paper that follows is Williams’s allusions to Pan and his implicit critique in Paterson of the environmental history of a small area of North America in the period between 1790 and 1940 look forward to the arguments of deep ecology, a late twentieth-century radical environmental theory that holds that the nonhuman being has as much right as the human being to exist independent of the nonhuman’s use to the human.