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The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams |
One of the most famous poems
in the twentieth century American poetry 'The Red Wheelbarrow' is an Imagist
poem. 'The Red Wheel barrow' is a poem of the Imagist movement. Imagism was a
movement in early twentieth century poetry that emphasized concise language and
fresh imagery over abstract ideas. The poem can be taken to illustrate many of
the features of modern American poetry.
Though it is deceptively
simple, it is actually rich and multiple in meaning. It foregrounds a
commonplace situation and image with sheer simplicity and an unusual poem is
made out of a single, simple sentence. The poem is composed of one sentence
broken up into four stanzas of two lines each.
This new vision of the common
image is that the poet is obviously aiming at. With careful word choice,
attention to language and unusual stanza breaks, Williams has turned an
ordinary sentence into a beautiful poem that has influenced the very idea of
what poetry is. The poem is at first sight puzzling, but if the reader knows
the basic techniques and tact for exploring the poetic situation and meaning,
it is not so. First, (as with any poem) it is necessary to guess who this
persona (not the poet) is. Then, a series of other questions can be asked about
its basic (imaginative) situation in order to understand the simple paraphrasable meaning
of the poem.
The speaker is a farmer, more
specifically a poultry farmer, because he is talking about ‘chickens’ and
‘wheelbarrow’. He doesn’t seem to be talking/ addressing to anyone; this seems
to be a typical poetic context of meditation (thinking aloud to oneself). He
seems to be in the backyard of his house. Looking at the wheelbarrow kept
beside the poultry sheds, and a few chickens seem to be huddling beside the
wheelbarrow. It is most likely early in the morning, after a rainy night,
because the wheelbarrow is glazing/ shining with rainwater as if in the first
hour after sunrise. In this situation, the speaker has just noticed the
wheelbarrow (with chickens beside it) and he suddenly and strongly realizes
that it is an important thing on which “so much depends”. This first stanza is
meditative; the farmer suddenly becomes thoughtful when he realizes that an
ordinary object is practically so important, and probably that he has never
realized it. Yes, so much depends on the wheelbarrow, that is, for the poultry
farmer: his very life, his and his family’s livelihood, their happiness and
success, besides their food, clothes and other basic needs, their education and
health care…. and what not. This is the simple meaning of the poem. But
generally and symbolically it means much more.
The images in the poem must
then be interpreted in the context of its basic situation. The speaker sees
that wheelbarrow is red. Red probably suggests things like life, blood, courage
and zeal that are a part of what the farmer sustains and supports. The wheel
barrow is one thing to us, but by splitting the word in two lines. The poet has
separated the wheel and the barrow (the body). The barrow depends on the wheel.
The wheel could be the symbol of life (process), progress, passage of time and
life, and so on. The theme of dependence and interdependence can be extended in
every direction. The chickens are white, probably suggesting that this is a
pure and sacred, uncorrupted and honest profession. There is also peace in this
natural and simple mode of a farmer. It may also remind readers of innocence.
The word ‘rainwater’ is split into two to make us see them separately and in
turns, and appreciate them. The poem draws our attention to several things, but
all the time with the utmost attention possible. The glazing/shining
wheelbarrow, bathed with the natural water of rain and the white chickens
create a simple but significant imagery that is symbolically accountable in
many ways. A Christian reader may interpret the red as the blood of Christ and
the white as related to the white of sacredness.
The Red Wheelbarrow is a good
example of Williams's statement, "No idea, but in things". The poem
presents an ordinary object as the exclusive image. The poem focuses so deeply
upon this image until the reader is forced to discover that this wheelbarrow is
not an ordinary object, but is the poem itself. By the end of the poem, the
image of the wheelbarrow is seen as the actual poem, as in a painting when one
sees the actual thing that is painted. It becomes the actual piece of art, the
piece of poetry that it is. The concept of "no ideas but in things"
means that all ideas are dependent upon the concrete things that we directly
observe; in this case the whole idea of 'theme' or any abstract concept thereof
"depends" so much on the actual 'thing', the wheelbarrow.
The poem is remarkable in its
poetic technique of creating a meditative poem out of a simple prosaic
sentence. For instance, the pause between the word "wheel" and
"barrow" has the effect of breaking the image down to its most basic
parts. 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. "Red wheel-barrow" is about
the relationship between the imagination and reality.
The meaning of this poem may
in fact seem so transparent because of its sheer simplicity. It basically
releases us from the expectations that good poetry must be difficult to
understand or that it must be written in a language removed from everyday
speech. It is a new Romanticism that Williams is putting into practice, once
again after Wordsworth, who did not actually implement the idea of simplicity.
The techniques of the poem in foregrounding the simple as special are
remarkable. Williams's use of line-break forces us to read slowly; it invites
us to look for significance in the scene described and the word used to
describe it. There need be no hidden meaning, though one is free to see it; but
one should not overlook the simple beauty of the poem as that of the simple
wheelbarrow. While the sense is ordinary and a perhaps typically American, we
are urged to see it in a new light.
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