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“The Red Wheelbarrow” *
By William Carlos Williams, 1883 – 1963
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Submitted by Lee Morgan of Ocean Grove:
Lee says, “William Carlos Williams was gifted at painting images with his poetry. After reading it again this evening I wonder if Williams felt an interconnectedness of all things as he observed the world.”
*”The Red Wheelbarrow” was first published in Williams’ 1923 book Spring and All.
Editor’s note by Paul Goldfinger, MD. Editor Blogfinger.net, Ocean Grove, NJ:
Williams was a practicing pediatrician in my hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey when I was attending Rutherford schools. But, unfortunately, I never heard of him then.
Poet Charles Pierre told me that there were other writers who were physicians including Oliver Wendell Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Michael Crichton.
I never understood this poem, but Lee says it is about imagery, as in painting images with words. OK, that is understandable, but, as with all poetry, there’s probably more there there.
What do you think? What about the opening sentence: “So much depends upon….” Anybody out there?
Read the comment below by “Blind Pursuit.” It is excellent. He is from Ocean Grove. —Paul Goldfinger, Editor @Blogfinger.
ALEXANDRE DESPLAT: “Elisa’s Theme” from the movie score of The Shape of Water.
What a magnificent & lovely article this is! Really great & phenomenal. Thanks a lot. Keep up the great job. Happy blogging.
Explaining a poem is a lot like explaining a joke, but since you asked, I’ll give it a stab. We tend to go through life just looking at things in a vague, undifferentiated way. Evolution hard-wired our brains to quickly scan a scene and get the gist without having to pay overly close attention to the details. Williams, however, is suggesting that the details matter, because what we think of as the “overall scene” is in fact entirely and only a collection of specific details. Your correspondent Lee Morgan had it right when he alluded to the “interconnectedness of all things.” The whole world is nothing more or less than the things that make it up, and only by paying careful attention to the things that make it up do we truly see the world.
The way the poem is composed isolates and intensifies our experience of everything that makes up the scene. The short lines, the abrupt line breaks, and the separation between images all force the mind’s eye to stop and see what is really there. So, for instance, Williams deconstructs the first image so that it is not just “a red wheelbarrow” taken in all at once; rather, the spacing and the line break in “a red wheel / barrow” all force us to slow down notice that the object is made up of its parts: it’s red [stop, look, notice the color], it’s a red wheel [notice the wheel], it’s a red wheelbarrow. Everything is worth seeing and everything is worth naming. (Ditto the white chickens, the rain, the fact that the wheelbarrow is “beside” the chickens, the fact that the rain has “glazed” it.)
There is also some irony in starting by saying “so much depends / upon” and then stopping, since we are expecting something big and important — it all depends on what? — and what we get is a wheelbarrow. But the point is that everything is important — the wheelbarrow, the chickens, the rain, the color red, all matter. In fact, they’re all that matters.
Williams’s poem is memorable, and most readers who encounter it find it striking, slightly jarring, slightly mysterious, a bit humorous, and yet oddly apt — just like life (closely observed) itself.
Editor’s note: Blind Pursuit of Ocean Grove is no amateur poetry maven; He teaches college English to teen age scholars, some of whom have never seen a live chicken or a wheelbarrow.
Thanks Blind P. for that excellent analysis. I enjoyed it and, it gives me something to think about relative to my photography.—Paul @Blogfinger