Between Walls

Due to the poem’s simplicity and concision, it appears to invite, really demand creative interactions in the understandable urge to find some meaning, what readers have been doing with (and to) poetry since Antiquity. Williams’s poem has generated largely two schools of thought that each seek to burden exactly what the spare poem itself seemingly resists: the heavy weight of meaning.

To some, because the poem is set near a hospital, it speaks to the tension between life and death. After all, Williams himself was a practicing pediatrician and, as a routine element of his professional career, worked daily within that difficult dynamic. For Williams, then, the poem, set in that deserted alley on a dark night, captures a moment when death seems everywhere triumphant. Perhaps he has retreated to this back wing of the hospital to momentarily escape the pressing business of attending to his patients’ often heroic struggles to stay alive. Or perhaps he is in the back wing outside the hospital because he has just lost a patient or perhaps has delivered a bleak diagnosis and now struggles to recoup some kind of optimism.

In this reading, the alley space seems death soaked, a space “where / nothing / will grow” (Lines 3-5). In this quasi-allegorical reading, the shattered bits of a glass bottle catching the light from the streetlamps suggest hope. The hope is slender, perhaps, but a suggestion that amid the refuse of burned-out wood chips and rock, these radiant pieces of glass offer a kind of illumination. The green color, in turn, suggests the hope of life itself, the color associated with fertility, procreation, and springtime awakening. Appropriately, then, in this reading, hospitals themselves are associated with recovery and healing.

To others, however, the detritus in the hospital’s back alley—the fragments of stones, the bits of burned wood, the shards of broken glass—suggests the dehumanizing press of the postmodern urban world, an echo of the familiar 20th-century wasteland world. It is an oppressive landscape devoid of any kind of human energy. No one is in the alley. Nothing will grow in the alley because in humanity’s urban sprawl, humankind has all but abandoned its connections with nature. Hence the only green in an otherwise dead and junked alley are bits of glass, processed materials that suggest the wasteland of the post-industrial world. The green then becomes ironic, suggesting the authentic green that this urban site has long ago lost. The hospital and the shattered bottle thus suggest exactly how sick the postmodern world has become.

These elaborate allegorical readings impose on the poem weighty significance, one hopeful, the other despairing. The poem itself really does not endorse either reading. Rather, Williams’s poem offers the reader a complex moment of enchantment. The images that the poem shares do not, indeed cannot sustain either of the two meanings—it is only 22 words long. The poem defies interpretation and renders trivial any elaborate exegesis that heaps layers of meaning on a poem that seeks not to mean but to suggest. The manic energy of such unlicensed exegesis itself is self-sustaining and self-generating. Quiet that down and readers are left with a quiet, intimate snapshot of a moment.

The poem seeks to reenchant the world. The dreariest and simplest of objects there in that haphazard arrangement sometimes—not all the time, enchantment cannot be coaxed or forced—speaks to the open eye. If this image does not enchant, the poem argues, fine—but keep one’s eyes open for the image somewhere, some moment, that will. The effort to mine the poem for meaning ignores the simple/complex joy of the poem as a poem, the images as just that, things, ordinary and easily overlooked (the poem, literally, describes litter!), each with an integrity of their own. The poem then offers a moment of tectonic impact, the genesis of which is irrelevant, to which the open and alert eye of the poet responds and in turn shapes as is, without elaborate ornamentation, into the carefully sculpted lines of a poem. It does not matter that there is a hospital or a streetlamp or a broken bottle—it only matters that the roving, grasping, open eye of the poet saw it: a spare if radiant bit of beauty in a barren world gone to rubble and ash.

The poem, however, resists demanding that we embrace that spare moment of illumination that so devastated the poet that he felt compelled to take that moment and capture in the poem. It is his moment—the radiant optimism and giddy joy of the poem then is not that the poet had his moment but that the poem promises such moments of unexpected beauty to everyone. Look, the poem says, look carefully.