This modern poem will say little to some people. Perhaps, at first glance, it might seem simplistic and irrelevant. But this efficient poem will engage the memory of many a man who has lived in the country.
If a poem does not identify you, relate to you, or speak within your range of knowledge, you may be helped by identifying the poet—by finding him out through an external source. The poem above identifies me as a boy; therefore I have not found it necessary to seek information from outside to settle the poem’s meaning. If my interpretation is askew, it will be due to lack of research; but no harm will be caused. A good poem can convey parallel interpretations.
Someone ‘needs’ this wheel barrow badly. What is the wheel barrow like? Because the rain glazes on it, it is plain that the red wheel barrow is new. Because so much depends upon it, it may be that it was recently acquired to get a job done. Maybe it belongs to a boy who will depend upon it to make his summer’s wages. But the message, probably, is more carefree than this. It seems unlikely that Williams speaks as a detached observer, though that is possible. I believe that his description of the wheel barrow points back to his leisurely experience as a boy. The words, moreover, are words that a boy would use. The chickens, for example, are not called leghorns, but merely white. The plainest English is used to impress the reader with what the poet feels. The poet muses. He feels. Then he fashions a poem to share the feeling that his musing has dredged up. This poem, I have little doubt, is the product of reminiscence. It was not gotten right without pitiless pruning. The whole recollection is reduced to sixteen words, not one of them unnecessary. The wheel barrow, for example, is beside ‘the’ white chickens, not just ‘white chickens,’ indicating that other chickens might have been near, though not ‘beside.’
The poet colors his poem in qualifications: the wheel barrow is red; the water is rain water; the rain water is glazed; all of this beside the chickens, which chickens are white. The feeling of the poem, however, hinges on the first three words: ‘so much depends.’ How exhilarating is the sight of a red wheel barrow to a boy: how it looks beside white chickens—a wheel barrow so new that rain water still glazes it! It is no longer raining, else the water would run, not glaze. So the boy is preparing to go out and work his wheel barrow in the fragrant air. There’s mud and rocks and puddles of water. So much depends on that red wheel barrow. To the boy, the happiness of the day depends upon it. What an easy pleasant life on his way to the barn with his shiny new wheel barrow.
Williams Carlos Williams died the year before my life started. Not long after he died, I became the farm boy that his poem calls to mind. If he was like most writers, Williams accomplished what he set out to do: reach beyond the grave to cause someone to feel. I do not know anything about his worldview. But I know that he was a sensitive man, at least during the composition of his Red Wheelbarrow. The voice in this poem is the voice of a boy inside a man. According to Robert DiYanni, “A poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener is called a ‘dramatic monologue.’’’ (Robert DiYanni, Literature, p. 429.) Since every poem must address a silent listener, I would not set much weight on Mr. DiYanni’s scheme of classifying. Nevertheless, what he says does elicit the notion that Williams’ poem must be, if not a dramatic monologue, then a ‘sentimental’ one, given its nostalgic tone.
