Between Walls

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1938

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

“Between Walls” is a single sentence divided into five unrhymed couplets, which each have between two and four words. The pattern is not regular, nor is the syllable count within each line. Given the fragmentary look of the poem and the generous use of white space, the form is inviting, decidedly unintimidating. The form itself then creates a feeling of calm and encourages lingering over the words themselves. There is no capitalization to mark the beginning of the sentence; thus, the form suggests the images themselves—the hospital, the broken glass, the cinders—are suspended within the eternal present of a sentence that has no beginning and never ends. The key to the form here is enjambment, the design in a poem in which lines do not have end punctuation—none of them. One line moves effortlessly into the next. And without any closing punctuation, the poem itself flows on and through and never necessarily ends.

Meter

By traditional metrics, which is both the manipulation of syllables to create a percussive feeling of beat when the poem is read aloud and the clever collision of similar sounds of words to create striking patterns of rhyme, as most of Williams’s Imagist poems, “Between Walls” is free verse. It has no predictable, anticipated meter. It resembles a sentence, but within Williams’s careful manipulation of words in that sentence, the poem achieves a subtle rhythm, a quiet sonic cooperation that creates the feeling of a poem.

Given that the number of words per line alternates within the couplets anywhere from two to four, that anti-pattern creates a feeling of movement without the insistent clack and clatter of old-school rhythm. In that, the poem is organic, finding its own way to metered recitation. Indeed, each line plays on the metric concept of enjambment, in which the poet manipulates (or in this case entirely avoids) end punctuation. The poem creates a quiet tension (thematically tied to the tension in the poem between hope and despair) by juxtaposing hard consonants (B’s, G’s, P’s) against gentler consonants (the WH’s, the W’s, and the sibilant s’s). Take the word “wings”—read with poetic effect the word is in civil war with itself, the gentler “w” coming in the end to confront the hard “z” of the plural. Say it aloud with lingering effect and you get the poem’s use of meter to create conflict. The same aural effect is created later in the words “cinders” and “pieces.” In this, the poem resists the implications of careless and reckless word-jamming suggested by free verse. Williams uses irregular meter and the words themselves to create a subtle music heard in recitation. It is one of the cruelest ironies of Williams’s long career that by the time he was asked to record his early poems two massive strokes had impacted his ability to talk. In these recordings, his delivery is slow, thoughtful, lingering, reflecting his mind struggling to master the words while at the same time, ironically, giving sonic play to his vowels and consonants.

Voice

The simplest response to the poem is that obviously there is no voice. There is no context sufficient to define who is actually sharing this image. There is no conversation dynamic; there is no setting that might suggest what gave rise to the observation. The delivery, inevitably rich with sonic manipulations and sly word play, is nevertheless objective. To give the poem a specific voice would be to compromise the premise of the poem itself—no ideas, nothing, just the thing.

The voice, then, is at once earnestly serious and wickedly subversive, both elevated and comic. The poem can be read with elegant seriousness and then with jovial, even snarky irony. In this the voice captures the desperate optimism of Williams’s Imagism—in the end, all we have is an alley and bits of a broken bottle, and that will sustain. Without the commanding and oppressive interfering voice of a poet, we hear nothing but rather see everything. The reader thus is like a loving and hypersensitive stroller through an art gallery anticipating and welcoming tectonic impact without some annoying if well-intentional museum guide telling one when to say ohh and when to say ahh. Stroll in this blasted and brutal world, Williams advises, in the hope of the electric moment.