Between Walls

“Between Walls” is a single sentence divided into five unrhymed couplets, which each have between two and four words. The pattern is not regular, nor is the syllable count within each line. Given the fragmentary look of the poem and the generous use of white space, the form is inviting, decidedly unintimidating. The form itself then creates a feeling of calm and encourages lingering over the words themselves. There is no capitalization to mark the beginning of the sentence; thus, the form suggests the images themselves—the hospital, the broken glass, the cinders—are suspended within the eternal present of a sentence that has no beginning and never ends. The key to the form here is enjambment, the design in a poem in which lines do not have end punctuation—none of them. One line moves effortlessly into the next. And without any closing punctuation, the poem itself flows on and through and never necessarily ends.

By traditional metrics, which is both the manipulation of syllables to create a percussive feeling of beat when the poem is read aloud and the clever collision of similar sounds of words to create striking patterns of rhyme, as most of Williams’s Imagist poems, “Between Walls” is