so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
—“The Red Wheelbarrow ” by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems (New Directions Press, 1962)
This week I’ve decided to narrow my focus and think even smaller than usual. In a recent column Peggy Noonan, who back in the day was Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, surprised her readers (and me) by quoting W. C. Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a poem made famous by its deceptively casual simplicity (“Is this really a poem? I can do this!” was a typical response from my students.) Noonan, an anti-Trumpian Republican, used it as an upbeat appeal to appreciate what we have, and deal with it. Well, maybe. That sounds like my Grandma, bless her heart.
The poem first appeared, titled “XXII,” as the 22nd poem in Williams’ 3rd book, Spring and All (1923). Since its appearance, “The Red Wheelbarrow” has been continuously controversial and popular.
No one has defined poetry precisely except to say that it’s a “special” language, the kind of writing that people read more than once; and once they decide they like it (if they do), they read it again and again. So what’s so special about “The Red Wheelbarrow”?
First of all, it sounds good. Although it’s usually called free verse, its small frame’s very symmetrical (four two-line stanzas, 16 words). In those few words there’s assonance (rain / glazed; white / besides), consonance (depends / upon), and the matching of the opening cluck of “much” with the closing click of “chickens.” Readers don’t have to consciously notice this, but that’s one of the reasons it’s popular: it’s sneakily “musical."
Secondly, on the page it looks good. It’s shaped like a wheelbarrow; and has a small verbal surprise, like a Chinese firecracker (or fire cracker) by breaking up “wheelbarrow” and “rainwater” into “wheel / barrow” and “rain / water,” which balances the poem at four words per stanza. This forces us look harder at the individual words in particular, and our language in general. Unlike a “lesson,” Williams’ playful arrangement seeps into the reader’s mind subconsciously, until he or she reads it a lot and finds all the hidden surprises. By then, these 16 words are memorized, and will buzz around in your head at night.
And thirdly, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” with its hyperbolic insistence that so much depends on this modest farm scene, is, in a gentle way, funny: “[s]o much / depends upon / /. . . chickens”! That sounds like Colonel Sanders. I imagine Williams sitting there, rereading what he’s just written, and smiling like a Cheshire cat, perhaps thinking of “heavier” opening intensifiers, like “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” (Auden), “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky” (Eliot), or “Swear by what the sages spoke / By the Mareotic Lake” (Yeats).
Did Williams mean all this? Who knows, or cares? Reviewers responding to my own writings have said of the poem “Scars” (where I whack my dad accidentally with a plastic bat), “This is a perfect modern rendition of the Oedipus myth!,” and of my story “The Piano Tuner” (where a drunken piano tuner wrecks a timid book reviewer’s piano—and eventually his whole house), “This is a vivid description of the battle between the artist and the critic”). “Well,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
Finally, I should point out that with almost everything you say about poetry, the opposite of it can also be true. The imagists and followers rightly claimed that the strength of poetry is a real object, with “The Red Wheelbarrow” being a charming example of this. But what about Yeats’s “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”? And, in conclusion, here’s Williams himself in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there
—from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” By W. C. Williams in Pictures from Brueghel (New Directions Paperback, 1962)
This article appears in May 10-17, 2018.