The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams

Listen (to mbjesq read)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

-from Spring and All (1923)

Mjbesq writes,

“This stark, elegant piece always reminds me of the versatility of poetry and the agility of precision-crafted writing.

The poem’s opening couplet (“so much depends upon”) starts the reader on a traditional poetic journey into desires or physical imperatives which must be satisfied. This is what poetry is good at: finding emotional fault lines, tracing needs and wants, describing action or setting in a way intended to convey something conceptually more complex – more meaningful. Or I should say, this is what we do easily with poetry.

But somewhere between the second and third couplets, the poem makes a shift. (Actually, this is when the reader makes the shift. The poem itself transforms with the phrase a wheelbarrow, rather than calling out the wheelbarrow.) The language is not a high-flying metaphor or parable for anything. It does not teach, complain, exalt, condemn – or do any of those other didactic things poems usually do. Instead, the poem settles in to an intensely visual sensibility; and though the descriptive elements are really quite scant – a red wheelbarrow, wetness, white chickens – the resulting still-life has a rich, painterly quality. Williams does not so much describe an image as create one.

Still, the powerful opening couplet refuses to let the reader simply take in the scene, as if it were depicted on a canvass. There is a temporal, narrative element – and an urgency – quite apart from the visual snapshot. The mundane object and unremarkable birds are presented without the hint of action or any trace of expressive quality; and yet, we ache to know: who or what depends on a wheelbarrow, and why?

The beauty of this tension, and of the interplay of discursive strategies within the fourteen spare words of the poem, has kept me returning to this poem for years.

My deepest thanks to my lifelong friend Eric Zakim for introducing me to this poem.”

—-

The mundane nature of the scene and the clear, simple language Carlos Williams uses to create this image reminds me of van der Rohe (and of course, as he puts it, “God is in the details”) .

Welcome mbjesq!

Carlos Williams on pō’ĭ-trē – The Dance

[blackmamba]