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.