Between Walls

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1938

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

A Hospital

There is a simple (and pedestrian) reason why the poem takes place—as much as it takes place anywhere—behind a hospital: Williams was a practicing pediatrician at Passaic General for 30 years. He writes about what he knows, a doctrine in line with his perception of the privilege of poets to reveal the stunning (and unsuspected) beauty all around them and then share that realization.

If readers approach the poem as a more traditional kind of literary artifact, they would have the obligation to explore the hospital for levels of suggestion: It is a place to heal, thus the poem insists on the urgency of optimism and the possibility of redemption; it is a place where people die, thus the poem insists on a bleak sort of pessimism and struggles against the unsettling dark of the modern world; it is a monument to relentless urban construction, thus the poem critiques the contemporary urban blight-scape of rapid development and oppressive constructs; the word hospital itself comes from Latin, meaning shelter for weary travelers, thus the tiny poem itself offers a respite for the reader from the stress and emotional barrenness of the world. Of course, this ultimately becomes something of a game, pitting one creative reader against another. That the hospital can be reconstructed into conflicting levels of interpretation suggests that perhaps the most fruitful approach to the hospital is not as a symbol at all but rather an image, the backdrop to the gathering of stuff the poet happens to glimpse.

The Broken Glass Bottle

It is tempting to take the splinters of broken glass in the alleyway that the poet finds behind the hospital and perform a daring exploration into suggestion and possibility. That is, readers think they must interact with the text. Here’s a noun—do something with it. It is a thing and it is in a poem and hence, by some logic that escapes Williams, it needs to mean something. Not content to let the shards of green glass attract and in turn reward hungry eyes (as they do the poet), the pieces of broken glass must be a symbol of something.

The green suggests a traditional color for spring and nature’s renewal. So, the bits of glass suggest the urgency of nature’s ever-reaching rituals of renewal. The glass suggests fragility. So, the glass bits suggest the fragility of hope or perhaps the fragility of elegance (suggested at least theoretically by the bottle it once was?). The bottle is in pieces and is tossed forgotten into the alley. So, the fragments suggest humanity’s careless indifference to the ecosystem that keeps humanity alive and the unapologetic destruction of its beauty.

Or perhaps the broken glass bottle symbolizes nothing, means nothing, but is rather exactly what it is, a broken glass bottle that occasions, for reasons readers will never entirely fathom, excitation in the open and the restless eye of the poet.

Cinders

The alley behind the back of the hospital is covered by blackened cinders. That alone is not a particularly stunning revelation—cinders might reflect that the hospital burns much of its disposable garbage as was a practice in New Jersey public hospitals until the late 1950s. It is possible the cinders are a result of garbage can fires maintained by people without homes who gather about for warm and community. In any event, the cinders suggest past fires and in turn suggest a cold world without that energy, without that reassuring heat.

If cinders are read symbolically, readers might be encountering an echo of Eliot’s Western-civilization-as-wasteland metaphor, a dehumanized world without passion, without love. Readers may, then, be dealing with a world without feeling, without emotion, a world of the lonely without access to the warmth and comfort of love.

Or (and this is critical for Williams—a poet much taken by the pull of the senses and the world that opens up) perhaps readers are dealing with a tensile thing, a way to give the poem some texture. The little bits of coarse and burned wood and gravelly rocks and jagged edges of broken glass animate the otherwise two-dimensional recreation of the alleyway at night by appealing to touch. In this, a poem that delights in the visual extends the miracle of this epiphany to a new sense—the alley does not only provide visual stimulus but textural delight as well.