Between Walls

This is a Depression era poem. Although it makes no specific reference to that socio-economic context nor offers the now-familiar images of long breadlines, the desolate faces of the unemployed now without homes, or grim streets of shuttered shops, the poem is of its era. It offers a tender hope to an America reeling in its own failure, uncertain of its future. Ever the doctor, Williams refuses to accept anything but faith in recovery.

First published in 1938, “Between Walls” is both a part of its historical context and defiantly, gloriously apart from it. Although such speculation can be inexact, Williams most likely drafted the poem during the darkest moments in America’s nearly decade-long economic catastrophe, a national calamity of such proportions that it traumatized an entire generation struggling to come to terms with the sudden end to the premise of prosperity and to the giddy faith in the American Dream.

To an America ailing, Williams, the doctor, prescribes all he can offer: those moments, stolen from this otherwise barren and forbidding reality, when unexpectedly an entirely random collection of objects strewn about carelessly for reasons the poet cannot entirely explain speaks to the imagination, fires it up in a moment akin to an