Between Walls

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1938

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Darkness of the World

A physician by profession, Williams was, across four decades of writing, a redoubtable optimist. This poem, however, challenges the urgency to affirm that resilient optimism. Poised between the energy of the Roaring 20s and the emergence of the Greatest Generation just beginning to exert what would become its confident swagger and irrepressible optimism, “Between Walls” offers a vision of the world more in line with the forbidding wasteland imagery of the Modernists, most notably summarized in T. S. Eliot’s iconic “The Waste Land” (1922). The world behind and between the back wings of the hospital suggests a world that too easily resists enlightening.

The space in which the poem takes place is devoid of the busyness of people. It is a world where nothing grows, a closed-up space of rubble and litter, chips of burned wood and fragments of rocks. The poem suggests Eliot’s perception of a spiritually barren desert world, empty of the energy of hope, even the hope for hope. The sole illumination comes not from the soft gentle wash of natural light, not stars or the moon, but from a single light, artificial and garish, most likely a streetlamp. In turn that hard light reflects off bits of a broken bottle—seeing bits of broken glass in an alley would be a warning not to venture in. It is in short a claustrophobic world of alienation, barrenness, loneliness. It is a world that could use, really needs revitalization. But sadly the poem takes place near but outside a hospital.

The Accessibility of Beauty

Here is a poem that elevates litter to the sacramental. Beauty, generations of poets have told us, is that rarest of things; it is the face of the one person we love or the sweeping eyescape of some exotic destination (a sunrise or a sweeping mountain), or perhaps beauty is that singular tectonic encounter with a work of art so unique, so powerful its impact never entirely eases. But does the same hold true for litter? Williams is discontented with such an ambitious concept of beauty because it makes beauty all but inaccessible, an ideal that tantalizes as much as it frustrates. Wait for it, the poets say, it may happen. Thus, readers live in perpetual anticipation.

In “Between Walls,” Williams counters with living not in anticipation but rather in perpetual expectation. In allowing the otherwise forbidding landscape of the hospital back alley to offer that slender glint of beauty in an entirely unforced, unanticipated moment of quietly stunning beauty, the poem assures the reader that such moments are yours. Beauty is not in a museum, not along some exotic beach, not in the face or figure of the one you love. Beauty is in the everyday. The poem reenchants a world too easily, too blithely rendered as flat and banal. Beauty is all around and ready to reveal itself to the open and ready eye. That accessibility, that radiant moment of beauty here comes from the way the streetlamp glints off the bits of broken glass. That is enough, the poem argues, indeed that must suffice.

The Power of the Imagination

Williams’s poem grapples with a central concern: What is that power, that response mechanism that rewards the open and grasping eye with these marvelous moments of unforced epiphanies? The ability to respond to and interact with the real-time world as it is—the world of house cats and fire engines and birds on telephone wires and Queen Anne’s Lace rioting in the backyard and stop signs in the rain (each of which has centered a Williams poem)—does not always come from the heart or from the intellect or from the soul. Yet the ability to be enchanted is part of our hardwiring.

If the imagination is too often limited to children creating lush worlds of unicorns and dragons, fantasy-scapes perfect for getting lost in, or to the ability in that rare few to shape ideas into splendid artistic artifacts from poems to movies, paintings to inventions, Williams argues a much different kind of imagination. The imagination is that energy that finds delight in the casual choreography of, for lack of a better word, the stuff all around us. In a world where the heart is at best an uncertain, often treacherous agency, the intellect is too often lost in thought, and the soul is a commodity negotiated in some after-world game of salvation or damnation, the imagination alone is happy to be here, now, amid riches that can be too easily neglected. In glimpsing those fragments of broken glass, bits most people would not even notice, the poet finds consolation, elevation, and justification. If one must, make those fragments of discarded glass mean something—but perhaps one might just let them just be, be what they are: accidental expressions of color, shapes, lines there to scalp naked the imagination itself.