A crab without a home is an odd place to begin a poem about people, but William Wall's "Out of Doors" starts there. Its epigraph, taken from a description of the hermit crab in Alexander Dumas' *Grand Dictionary of Cuisine*, presents the creature as a half-finished knight. Above the waist he wears "cuirass, / gauntlet, visor." Below it there is "nothing. / Not even the tail of a shirt." The prim, fussy detail of that shirt-tail is funny, and it sets up the poem's central idea. Some people live inside protective shells, such as roles, manners and offices, because what lies beneath is soft and exposed. The poem sets two such figures against one person who seems to have no shell at all.
Wall's own stanza about the crab sharpens the comedy. "Head of a lobster & tail of a slug" is a neat, brutal summary, and "slug" is answered by "plugs" in the next line, a blunt near-echo that makes the creature's retreat sound almost like plumbing. "His preoccupation is secrecy" is deliberately dry, a mock-scholarly phrase. Then the short line "Catch the hermit" drops into "out of doors & his shame is lethal." The word "lethal" changes the tone. The title now means more than being outside. It means being exposed, and the poem treats that as dangerous.
The hinge is "I think of that as I watch," and the speaker becomes a walker taking notes. The priest "slip[s] lithely into a waiting car," and the car quietly repeats the "convenient shell" of the crab. The poem is sharp about the mismatch between man and movement. Grace is "out of place / on his bulk," and the rhyme of *place* and *grace* falls across a line break, as smooth and slightly too practised as the manoeuvre it describes. The simile of "a geisha kneeling to the tea" is surprising because it makes his poise look like learned ritual rather than natural ease.
The politician gets the same treatment. The "deft shrug" is a kind of shell in itself, and his "face is closed & smiling." Then comes the strangest word in the poem, "viaticum," the communion given to the dying. Judging by the imagery, the handshake has become a sacrament with the meaning drained out, and the religious vocabulary links the two men. Church and state both seem to work through gestures that protect the person making them. The named place, Daunt's Square, and later Wellington Road, root the poem in a real town, so the satire feels like observation rather than abstraction. The poem never says what these men are hiding, and that restraint is more unsettling than an accusation would be.
The final stanza breaks the pattern. The "tall blond girl" rests her hand on a boy's sleeve, a light, unguarded touch, and the speaker concludes, "I see that her life is open-air." Her "face is a sea of gifts," a metaphor of movement and abundance set against the politician's closed face. The last phrase carries a pun, because "an engagement without armour" can mean a couple's engagement, and it can also mean a battle fought without protection. It brings us back to the cuirass and visor of the epigraph. The speaker is still judging by appearances, though, as he did with the priest and the politician, which makes his certainty about her slightly provisional.
The form supports this plain, watchful tone. The poem has five stanzas of five lines, the epigraph included, and no fixed rhyme scheme. Sound is used sparingly, in echoes like *slug/plugs* and *place/grace*, so the poem sounds like speech rather than song. The ampersands and the lack of full stops at line ends give it the feel of jottings made on a walk, which suits a speaker collecting evidence.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to be only satire. The hermit's shame is "lethal," so the poem has some sympathy for creatures who hide. Yet it ends on openness as a gift rather than a danger, and the reader is left to wonder what being unarmoured would cost, and whether the speaker, who only watches, could manage it himself.