The Art of Poetry: Interpretation and Imagination in William Carlos Williams'‘the Red Wheelbarrow'

William Carlos Williams, born in Rutherford, New Jersey, was one of the major writers of the Modernist movement, and he contributed greatly to the creation of a distinctly innovative American voice. He consciously provided a counterpoint to the works of Frost, Pound and Eliot, yet successfully composed his own highly original poetry of sensuous and associative immediacy and surprising vivacity, in spite of the ostensible aura of improvisation that one gains from a preliminary reading. ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ perhaps epitomises Williams’ succinct, deceptively simple and extremely evocative style, and in many ways he can be regarded as an artistic poet, for he is able to capture a moment in time like an un-posed snapshot or a still-life painting, and he then presents a picture which hints at hidden possibilities and attractions.

The meticulous metrical convention of ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ involves just three words in the first line of each couplet and a disyllable in the second.# Interestingly, the line termini of the second and third stanzas severs the compound nouns , ‘wheelbarrow’ and ‘rainwater’ into their constituents, forcing the reader to pause and savour each building block of language and meaning; to analyse and appreciate every image in the scene. Also, the fact that we are awaiting grammatical and semantic understanding at the end of the first line of each couplet results, as Charles Altieri observed, in our minds being “made to hover over details…so that we are lead to recognise the miraculous quality of words and cares eventually taking hold”.# The use of monosyllabic words in line three, ‘a red wheel’, coupled with the notable drawn-out assonance of the letter ‘e’ further coerces the reader into examining the etymology of the line, and ultimately to meditate upon the beauty and simplicity of life. In this respect, Williams becomes both poet and painter: he wields form and line as the artist wields paint and brush in order to capture that moment in time and to present his picture. Williams himself was aware of his role as artist, evident from the painterly lexical field of his comment, “It’s what you do with a work of art; it’s what you put on the canvas and how you put it on the canvas. Poems are…made of words, pigments, put on, here, there, made actually”.

Continuing in his artistic vein, William Carlos Williams’ poem relies heavily upon imagery. It has been argued that this poem is simply an imagist poem, and this could conceivably be true, if it were not for the fact that the poem also conveys a message. It is not only the image of the “red wheelbarrow” that is important, but our own faculty to imagine. The opening line of the poem, ‘so much depends upon’ endorses this reading, for it at once suggests that William Carlos Williams intended to create a poem which would initiate a thought process in regards to what is really important in life. The poet’s use of elliptical expression to suggest that some information is omitted, specifically, what exactly it is that ’depends/upon’ the scene. The reader is thus left to their own interpretation : it could be that human beings depend upon the wheelbarrow as a mode of transport to reduce the physical labour of farm work, they depend upon the chickens as a source of sustenance and perhaps profit, and they rely on the rain to enable their crops to grow so that everything can survive. Similarly, the chickens depend upon the wheelbarrow to bring them grain and they rely on the rain to produce the grain in the first place and to provide them with water to survive. In this respect, the poem can be seen as an observation on the inter-connecting web of life, which is reflected in the poem’s aurality, which is interlinked and cyclical in itself. The first and final lines, for example, are connected by the sounds ‘ch’ and ‘enz’ in, ‘much depends’ and ‘chickens’. There are further consistencies found within the poem, which suggests that all aspects of this world are intimately related: there is the elongated ‘o’ of ‘so’ and ‘barrow’ in the first and second stanza, and the extended assonantal ‘a’ in the line, ‘glazed with rain/water’ and then the repetition of ‘I’ in the line, ‘beside the white’. Furthermore, it is worth noting that every stanza depends on its succeeding stanza for meaning; none of the stanzas are self-contained; it is only by reading the poem in its entirety