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).