The Red Wheelbarrow -- William Carlos Williams

(Poem #83) The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. -- William Carlos Williams

Simple, elegant, and wonderfully evocative... this is more painting than
poem.

thomas.

"Reading this poem is like peering at an ordinary object through a pin
prick in a piece of cardboard. The fact that the tiny hole arbitrarily
frames the object endows it with an exciting freshness that seems to
hover on the verge of revelation."
    - Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry.

[Biography]

William Carlos Williams was born September 17, 1883 in Rutherford, New
Jersey, to middle-class parents who were lovers of literature and visual
art. But Williams showed little interest in art until he attended the
University of Pennsylvania's medical school. It was there that he became
enamoured with poetry and was for some time torn between his parents'
wishes that he become a doctor and his own, less conventional
aspirations. While in Pennsylvania, Williams befriended the poet Ezra
Pound, a relationship that he later termed a watershed in his literary
career. Pound not only helped Williams develop his aesthetic of magism -
a poetic approach that emphasized the concrete over abstractions - but
also introduced him to a literary circle that included the flamboyant
poet Hilda Doolittle (H. D.). By the time Williams completed his
studies, he was committed to his writing; yet he still pursued a medical
career and maintained a private practice in Rutherford for over forty
years. From his medical practice Williams gained not only the financial
freedom to write what he wished, but also a rare and intimate insight
into the lives of common people.

Williams's immersion in and attachment to the lives of Rutherford's
townsfolk was mirrored in the aesthetic principles he developed over the
years. He consistently advocated and wrote literature that took its
themes from ordinary life and its voice from the patterns of common
speech. During much of his poetic career, however, these values ran
counter to those of the critically acclaimed poetry of the day - namely,
the classicist, academic, and formal poetry exemplified by T. S. Eliot
and Wallace Stevens. During the 1920s and 1930s Williams labored largely
in obscurity; with the publication of the first Paterson volumes in the
1940s, however, he gained wider recognition, and the emerging Beat
Movement poets of the 1950s venerated him for his rejection of
formalism. Shortly after receiving a Pulitzer Prize, Williams died on
March 4, 1963.

[Commentary]

The opening lines set the tone for the rest of the poem. Since the poem
is composed of one sentence broken up at various intervals, it is
truthful to say that "so much depends upon" each line of the poem. This
is so because the form of the poem is also its meaning. This may seem
confusing, but by the end of the poem the image of the wheelbarrow is
seen as the actual poem, as in a painting when one sees an image of an
apple, the apple represents an actual object in reality, but since it is
part of a painting the apple also becomes the actual piece of art.

Notice how the monosyllabic words in line 3 elongate the line, putting
an unusual pause between the word "wheel" and "barrow." This has the
effect of breaking the image down to its most basic parts. The reader
feels as though he or she were scrutinizing each part of the scene.
Using the sentence as a painter uses line and color, Williams breaks up
the words in order to see the object more closely.

The word "glazed" evokes another painterly image. Just as the reader is
beginning to notice the wheelbarrow through a closer perspective, the
rain transforms it as well, giving it a newer, fresher look. This new
vision of the image is what Williams is aiming for.

The last lines offer up the final brushstroke to this "still life" poem.
Another color, "white" is used to contrast the earlier "red," and the
unusual view of the ordinary wheelbarrow is complete. Williams, in
dissecting the image of the wheelbarrow, has also transformed the common
definition of a poem. With careful word choice, attention to language,
and unusual stanza breaks Williams has turned an ordinary sentence into
poetry.

    - from the Gale Poetry Resource Center
http://www.gale.com/gale/poetry/poetset.html