To a casual reader, this poem shows a truly Americana scene from that time (1920’s), and sharp images are blazed into the mind. One can easily see the “red wheelbarrow” and the “white chickens”.

To a well versed reader, you gain the appreciation of what Williams was trying to derive with his amazing choice of line breaks. Look at the relationship of
depends/upon, wheel/barrow, rain/water; all of which are in direct upwards and downwards connection. Depends comes from the latin “to hang”, which is a downward idea and upon is from the Old English meaning simply “up”, which give a contradicting upward idea. We see the same similarity in wheel (a thing that rolls upon the ground) and a barrow (which sets atop this wheel), as well as rain (the water that falls downward from the sky) and water (the liquid sitting on the earth). White emphasizes the chickens, which is a whole other story.

Finally, with the erudite ideals; this poem was written my Williams when he was visiting a sick girl, and he saw this simple, beautiful scene outside her window. There we can jump off to many interpretations of life, death, and the brilliance of what is the good life, and what is important to us.

In order to understand why this poem works, and why it requires craft, here are a number of factors to consider.

1) Spend some time thinking about what actually does depend on that wheelbarrow. (As Kaffinator points out, it’s very different from what depends on a lawnmower).

2) Think of the “characters” in the poem. There’s a wheelbarrow, chickens, and possibly rainwater. What are they like? How are they different? If you walked in on the scene, how would you react to each of them?

3) Think about when this poem was written. I’ll give you this one: it was 1923. What was big in the world then. And forgive me for being a little too leading here, but we’ve got a contrast set up between red and white. What event, still recent in 1923, placed great significance on the colors red and white?

4) I haven’t gotten very far with the rain water myself, so if you come up with anything there, I’d love to hear about it.

Now run through the same or similar thought exercises, using a green lawnmower and brown rabbits.

Cheers,
Cliff

Thanks for the post on poetry. Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow” was my first exposure to imagist poetry, and to this day I greatly enjoying H.D. and other (now unfashionable) imagists. I use Perrine in homeschooling my children, and I rather wish I had had as good a grounding in how to read a poem as Sound and Sense offers before I was bulldozed by theory in college. It amazed me how many English majors were afraid of poetry, and tended to treat it like prose with line breaks. I hope to do better by my children, and if they don’t grow up to be English majors (perhaps opting for something that earns a living instead), I’d like them to grow up to continue reading and enjoying.

Thanks for sharing some from the teaching side of your life. Feel perfectly free to forget that there are TR dragons to slay; I would not mind hearing more from you on this area of your life.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/wheelbarrow.htm

I’m not much of a poetry fan but I liked this Williams piece (which I’ve never even heard of before). He is clearly painting a nostalgic farm scene (where else do you find chickens?) and many of us urbanites get unbidden warm fuzzies from such scenes, thank you Normal Rockwell. Digging a little deeper though, the red wheelbarrow is clearly an instrument (and a metaphor?) for human labor. But it is glazed with rain, and accompanied by a domesticated animal, both gifts of God. The poem makes me realize that the wheelbarrow, useful as it is, wouldn’t really have any use without the gifts of divine Provision. The wheelbarrow becomes more, then, as it represents the way that humans appreciate and partake of God’s common grace. So much does depend upon that wheelbarrow, but fortunately it (and we) are indeed designed to carry a certain amount of weight.

By contrast, Taylor’s lawnmower represents our need to confine nature to a convenient square green patch so that our neighbors will be fooled into thinking we lead orderly lives. It’s glistening with dew because the homeowner is too lazy to put it away at night. The rabbits are probably a 4H project or something but they really aren’t very useful because nobody but a heartless wretch would actually eat Bouncy the Rabbit. So ultimately it’s not true that many things depend upon that lawnmower, unless we take the first line in a satirical sense, and then the rest of the poem is just a mess.

Michael, I react with annoyance to maybe 60% of what you write in general, but for this post – thank you. There’s a lot more poetry in the Bible than we realize, and perhaps heightening our awareness of poetry in general will help us to appreciate inspired poetry all the more.

So in William’s poem we have no obviously great ideas communicated or skilled rhyme or meter but simply a captured moment–that can inspire deep thought or emotion. Sort of literary ‘photography’. Like a photographer choosing just the right subject, angle and lighting, Williams chooses a red wheelbarrow and white chickens and that makes it very different from Mike’s green lawnmower and brown rabbits.

Admittedly, I was never too comfortable with the tendency among many of my teachers to find all sorts of meaning in poetry (and prose). The problem is, we don’t usually have the author around to ask what he meant, and, even if we did, people would continue to read beyond what the author said (often employing some sort of pseudo-psychology to pretend like the interpreter knows the author better than the author knows himself). As Freud once allegedly said, “Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.”

So, aside from intellectual teachers reading their favorite world-views into Shakespeare or Frost, I love poetry.

And you are exactly right: poetry, like any other art, takes learning to appreciate. I never really appreciated painting (beyond, “it’s a pretty picture”) until I took an art class at college. My girlfriend has a better appreciation for music than I do (despite us both being musicians to some degree) because of her greater understanding of what’s going on (I’ve recently started taking piano lessons, and my teacher has also been going over theory, so I’ve been developing a greater appreciation of music).

With poetry, it’s the same thing. I appreciate Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” because I have some idea of how his use of alliteration and other poetic devices causes the reader to speed up or slow down, and affects the way the poem is written.

Of course, just as you can have a person who technically plays all the notes Back wrote perfectly, yet never plays the music, you can have someone read all the words Poe wrote, yet never recite the poem.

Of course, you can also have someone live by all the words written in Scripture, yet never live the Spirit in/by which they were written.

Congrats in trying to teach this appreciation to your students! May God give you grace!