The Red Wheelbarrow
|
|
The Red Wheelbarrow is a poem by William Carlos Williams.
Williams' Imagist influenced philosophy of “no ideas but in things” is perfectly exemplified in The Red Wheelbarrow. The poem, written in two minutes or so, is a simple description of a scene Williams witnessed from his backyard every day. The poem is intentionally plain and lucid. Williams was trying to veer away from what he saw as the “European” verbosity of his peers (T.S. Eliot, for example), to create a typical “American” image with his poem.
Williams molds his image through a unique choice of words. The poem is written in “common” language without any obscure words. His adjectives have no subjective connotations, they are employed simply to describe a noun. For example, “red” is used rather than “scarlet” or any other “intense” adjective. Much of the poem's strength comes from the lines “so much depends/upon.” The reader is left to figure out what depends upon what. These four words also shape the theme of the poem: the importance and magnificence of the commonplace.
The structure of the poem, similar to that of ordinary free verse, is more complex and intentional than it appears. Williams ignores capitalization and punctuation, making the poem seem more an abstraction than traditional verse. Williams, in his attempt to convey a singular image, does away with poetic syntax and structure. The structure is such that every part of the poem occurs in order, image by image, to finally make a whole out of these parts. The gradual nature of The Red Wheelbarrow is further shaped by the splitting of compound words and adjective-noun combinations. For example, in the lines “a red wheel/barrow,” he separates the word “wheelbarrow” into two nouns, thus making each part of the image equally important and letting it grow as the reader progresses. The impersonality of the poem (there is no “I”) creates a sense of universality. This kind of structure makes the poet, even the actual “poem,” unimportant relative to the image of the wheelbarrow it creates, and the impression it may make upon the reader's imagination.
The subject matter of The Red Wheelbarrow is what makes it most unique and important. He lifts an ordinary, even mundane, scene to the level of art, emphasizing the importance of the commonplace; as he says, a poem “must be real, not “realism,” but reality itself." In this way, it holds more in common with the haiku of Basho than with the verse of T.S Eliot. Basho, a master of Japanese haiku, wrote poems that are somewhat similar to The Red Wheelbarrow (e.g “Moonlight slants through/The vast bamboo grove:/A cuckoo cries”). Although probably not directly influenced by Eastern poets, Williams helped to bring the idea of “daily life” poetry to America in the form of “Imagism.”
Here is the poem in its entirety:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens