I would consider an excerpt from, The Walls Do Not Fall, by Hilda Doolittle one of the most intriguing poems I have read by far. As the title suggests, the poem is quite literally about different walls that refuse to fall no matter what seems to happen. Very straightforward and not much to find interesting in that particular aspects. What makes this particular poem so interesting, though, are the actual walls. “Pompeii has nothing to teach us, we know crack of volcanic fissure, slow flow of the terrible lava”, this quote suggests two very important points:

1. Pompeii was destroyed by lava. Lava causes anything that it touches to burn. While most things fizzle away never to be seen again, other things are preserved. For example, human bodies are sometimes preserved along with the skeletons of structures…or the walls. These items are preserved through the lava cooling and hardening in to a rock like substance.
2. The second point ties directly into the first point. Th poem is entitled, “The Walls Do Not Fall”, in Pompeii there were and are walls that did not and will not fall.

This quote was the beginning of a narrative that seems to stress the importance of walls within the human body, structure, society, everywhere. Hilda Doolittle impressed upon the notion that walls are the backbone of everything and seem to be even more important than what’s in and on them. But the question is, why write a poem about a wall? Yes, they are important to the structural foundation of a home. And yes they can become important when speaking about psychology and how people sometimes build walls to keep certain things in and other things out. What could possibly be so important about a wall?

World War II began in the year 1939 and ended in 1945. Hilda wrote this poem in the beginning of the 1940s, during the time when World War II was just getting started. From September 1940 through May 1941, Germany performed bombing raids, called Blitz, on London during the night. Hilda Doolittle lived in London during this time so she saw the devastation that the bombs did to London first hand which is what this poem is about. This poem is about the death and devastation that London experienced during this time. People that went to bed thinking that they would wake up the next day didn’t, “the bone frame (flesh) was made for no such shock knit within terror, yet the skeleton stood up to it”. For the people that parishes during the raids, all that was left was their bones.

Going back to the earlier quote, armed with historical background, a new analysis can be made. The quote, “Pompeii has nothing to teach us, we know the crack of volcanic fissure, slow flow of terrible lava”, means quite literally, the history and destruction of Pompeii cannot help with the destruction that was happening at this particular time. Scientists began to understand how volcanoes worked and could predict when they would erupt so a catastrophe like Pompeii would hopefully not happen again. But how do you predict when a country will randomly bomb you at night? If caught early enough, one can escape lava, but how do you escape a bomb?

But, although all of this went on, Hilda still held a sense of hope, “yet the frame held; as we passed the flame: we wonder what saved us? what for?”. This speaks about the perseverance of man but the inevitable pain and suffering that will come from it. No one came out of this situation unaffected, unbothered, or unscathed. Although there was hope, there were some wounds that would take a lifetime to heal. In this particular part of the quote, “we wonder what saved us? what for?”, it is almost as if she is saying that it it better off to be dead.