Between Walls

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1938

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Poem Analysis

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Further Reading & Resources

Related Poems

“The Oven Bird” by Robert Frost (1916)

This is a more traditional Modernist reading of a world that appears edging toward nothingness and how to handle the threat of decline into a world without the possibility of hope. Unlike “Between Walls,” however, Frost cannot bring himself to find the stuff of hope in this 20th-century wasteland. Rather, Frost offers only the grim advice to make the most of a diminished thing, a striking comparison to Williams’s sumptuous embrace of that same diminished world.

“The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams (1923)

Frequently anthologized with “Between Walls,” although the composition dates are separated by more than a decade, this Imagist poem that captures the fleeting moment of white chickens and a rain-spattered wheelbarrow plays out Williams’s painterly fondness for the arresting image. Like the glass bottle and the cinders, the objects in the poet are sublimely happy to stay images despite generations of well-intentioned readers who have imposed often impressive analyses on Williams’s Zen-like lines.

“In a Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound (1913)

A fragile, delicate couplet crafted by Pound, the philosophical force behind the rise of Imagism, the poem captures a moment in a Paris underground train station with its usual press of eager and hurried passengers that in a single, unexpected moment of impact urged the poet to record it, comparing the faces to petals of a tree. As with Williams (who was a friend of Pound’s), the poem, at once ruthlessly objective and yet generously subjective, in its simplicity suggests rather than means.

Further Literary Resources

“Cubism in Words: Broken Pieces in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams” by Jason Menzin (2014)

This is a close study of how Williams, intrigued by the aesthetic experiments of the Cubists, brought to his poetry a sense of fragmentation to suggest his perception of the discontinuity and fractured nature of modern sensibility. This article provides a lengthy exegesis of “Between Walls” and suggests that the pieces of broken glass are at once a reminder of the emptiness of the modern world and a slender offer of hope in the unexpected aesthetic pleasure of the fragments in the alley’s cinders.

“William Carlos Williams’ ‘Between Walls’” by M. Alan Babcock (2010)

A line-by-line reading of the poem, this analysis suggests how Williams juxtaposes the shimmer of light from the broken glass to the scatter of cinders in the hospital alley to offer a muted, understated kind of hope in a “world of cinders and broken glass.”

“William Carlos Williams, Literacy, and the Imagination” by Francis E. Kazemek (1987)

An early and thoughtful analysis of Williams’s Imagist poems, this article suggests that we need a term for the energy of redemption and reclamation that sustains and elevates Williams’s brief snapshot poems, among them “Between Walls.” The article reminds readers that from their earliest education the imagination is used to help them understand the world. The energy that glimpses the broken bottle comes not from the heart or the intellect; rather, the article suggests Williams taps into his imagination and in turn challenges his readers to open their eyes and allow their imaginations to respond.