The Red Wheelbarrow | Poem Explanation | William Carlos Williams

About ' William Carlos Williams

Williams (1883-1963), a general medical practitioner by profession, pursued writing as a vocation. Williams was a friend of Ezra Pound during the early years of his career and under his stimulus became interested in Imagism. His credo, 'No ideas but in things', voiced the spirit of Imagism with its surface simplicity and attention to exactness of language. Williams felt that he required a tight and controlled form to express the life around him accurately in the essential American speech idiom. In 'A Note on Poetry' Williams states, 'In my own work it has always sufficed that the object of my attention be presented without further comment.'

This method has best been illustrated in his poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow'. Williams said, 'Anything that the poet can effectively lift from its dull bed by force of the imagination becomes his material. Anything, the commonplace, the tawdry, the sordid, all have their poetic uses if the imagination can lighten them.' All art and particularly poetry appeals to the senses.

The senses do not exist without an object for their employment, hence all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain-it presents. Some of Williams' poems are 'talking' poems, others are 'seeing poems'. "The Red Wheelbarrow' is an imagist poem-one of his 'seeing' ones.

'The Red Wheelbarrow' Poem

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Glossary

Line 1, 2. wheelbarrow a small cart with one wheel and two shafts to carry garden loads, etc.

Line 5. glazed fitted (a window, picture, etc.) with glass; with a glassy finish

Explanatory Notes

1. In this imagist poem, the poet uses only a few words that behave as signs, thus creating a single visual image in its unique combination in space and time as in a painted picture. The language used is objective and definite. All fanciful language is avoided, thereby, focusing the reader's attention upon the object, the poem, itself.

2. Ezra Pound had warned against the 'shovelling in' of words to fill a metrical pattern. Hence there is no place in his poetry for verbosity. Even rhythm has to be intrinsic, it cannot be merely a careless dash off with no grip or hold on the words and sense.

3. "The Red Wheelbarrow' has a form. It is made up of four stanzas each consisting of a three-word line followed by a one-word line. Typographically also the poem puts forth a simple 'picture-play' with a visual word-pattern. The sentences resemble the manner of natural speech, emphasising the falling inflection on words such as upon, barrow, water and chickens. Note the urgency and compelling quality of the first two lines.

4. Notice the bold colour contrast: the red, the shining red due to the rain and then the sun, set off against the whiteness of the wool- ball white chickens compelling the readers to visualise such an extraordinary combination of objects within the given space and time.

5. The beautiful strangeness of the everyday world comes to us when it is really seen, really experienced. A red wheelbarrow shining with rain water is certainly not a rare thing when seen on its own but what is important is the unique combination of these everyday objects and their coexistence in time and space. The shine, the red, the white are imaginatively reproduced, so is the clucking of the chickens. The technique is close to the technique of painting and closer to photography in 'freezing the moment'. Hence so much depends upon the red wheelbarrow, the rain, the white chickens all together and separately. They do not stand for anything beyond themselves. It is important therefore to avoid the temptation to interpret such poems symbolically.