Song Of The Artesian Water - Analysis

Defying Providence with a Drill

Paterson’s central claim is blunt and bracing: when drought kills the stock and prayers fail, survival becomes an act of human will, muscle, and machinery. The poem opens with catastrophe—the stock have started dying—and immediately rejects the usual colonial pieties: sick of prayers and Providence. That refusal isn’t quiet skepticism; it’s a declaration of independence. The men stand between derricks up above and solid earth below, poised at the lever, as if the landscape itself has been turned into a contest of force. The repeated chant—Sinking down, deeper down—sounds like a work song, but it also reads like a vow: they will answer drought not with faith, but with descent.

The Devil as a Measure of Desperation

The poem’s famous provocation—If the Lord won’t send us water, we’ll get it from the devil—is less theology than pressure-gauge. Paterson uses hell-talk to dramatize how far the workers are willing to go, and to suggest that drought makes ordinary moral categories feel irrelevant. The men imagine themselves drilling past the reach of heaven and into the jurisdiction of Satan, later hearing themselves knocking on the roof of Satan’s dwellin’. The joke is grim, because the stakes are not: ruin to the squatter hangs over the scene, and the land is described as a station where the weather’s growing hotter. In this world, “Providence” is not comforting; it’s absent, almost negligent, and the poem dares it to object.

Work Becomes Myth: Men, Engines, and Strain

Even as the speaker boasts, the poem keeps returning to the stubborn material facts that pride can’t soften. The engine, built in Glasgow, is supposedly twenty horse-power, but the men treat that figure like a polite fiction; under sun-dried gidgee logs it surges to thirty horses and more. This is a comic exaggeration, yet it also captures a frontier logic: resources are improvised, measured by what they can be made to do. Then the tone tightens as the bore fights back. The shaft started caving; yellow rods are bending; the tubes are always jamming; the crew must burst the engine with a forty horse-power lift. Here the refrain is no longer only a chant—it’s an insistence against failure, a way of pushing fear down with the drill.

The Turn: From Hellward Bravado to Sudden Abundance

The hinge of the poem arrives with sound: the whistle’s blowing in a wild, exultant blast. After the long sequence of “no”—there’s no artesian water even past three thousand feet—success comes not as a gentle reward but as eruption. Water rushing up the tubing becomes a vertical miracle, spouting above the casing in a million-gallon flow. The earlier devil imagery is answered, but not by God: the water rises from silent hidden places where the old earth hides her treasure. Paterson shifts the source of salvation from heaven to geology. The “miracle” is real, but it belongs to the earth’s deep storage, unlocked by human persistence.

Comfort That Keeps Moving: Water as Hope and Responsibility

In the final stanza, the poem’s energy changes direction. It’s no longer only Sinking down; it’s Flowing down, further down. The water’s motion is described with quiet pleasure—glimmers in the shadow, flashes in the sun—and then with moral weight: it is bringing hope and comfort to the thirsty land and to tortured thirsty cattle. The earlier bravado was about conquering depth; now the emphasis is on distribution, on letting the recovery spread across miles of blazing plain. The poem’s satisfaction comes not merely from striking water, but from the sight of relief moving outward, an answer that keeps going rather than stopping at the wellhead.

A Hard Question Under the Celebration

The poem thrills to human stubbornness, yet it also hints at a troubling bargain: to live on this land, must the people keep escalating—deeper, costlier, closer to hell? When the speaker jokes about cave the roof of hell in, the line carries a shadow of truth: the victory requires violence against the earth’s resistance. Paterson celebrates the flow as free, unstinted, but the poem leaves you wondering how “free” such abundance really is when it depends on drilling ever further into silent hidden places.