by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: March 11, 2009   Last Updated: October 28, 2009

Few poems have received as much rejection of analysis as The Red Wheelbarrow by W. C. Williams. The greats of literary criticism have written reams about the 16-word poem, and their analyses have received comments like these. (They are reproduced verbatim with spelling and grammar errors.)

"Dear me, al this fuss over a poem which probably the poet had no true conscious thoughts about."

"People are reading way too much into these poems, things that aren't there."

"I cant believe that this tiny, simple, little poem has provoked so many different interpretations."

"the pome is to small "

(The above comments are from American Poems, our Poetry Site.)

I invite comments on my brief analysis which makes no claim to being exhaustive. I had intended it as an illustrative addendum to an article I wrote previously on poetry analysis. It "got away from me," and I felt it deserved its own selfhood, for better or worse. Here is the poem as published in Spring and All That.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

At first glance, the poem invites a shrug of the shoulders. It would appear to be a painter's still life rendered in words, but there is far more here than meets the eye and ear. Line one consists of two iambic feet, or two stressed syllables, each preceded by an unstressed syllable. Readers ask themselves what is the "so much" the poet is referring to. Then follows the only verb in the sentence that constitutes the poem. "Depends" is a commonplace verb nearly always followed by "on" or "upon." If this were prose, we would not give the independent clause a second thought. But this is not prose.

A careful reader will remember that the Latinate verb is made up of a prefix (de-) and root (pend-) that translate as "to hang from," which makes our idiomatic "depend upon" sound overloaded with prepositions. The verb contains the Latin preposition "de" and is followed by our preposition which is a yoking of "up" and "on" - a wheelbarrow load of prepositions.

In the second pair of lines, we have that basic, age-old object separated into "wheel" followed by "barrow," a single word and the poem's fourth line. The "so much" begins to yield specific meaning. One of humankind's earliest tools was the wheel, and barrow suggests the inclined plane. Think how many primitive and high tech-tools, vehicles and instruments are derived from the wheel and the physics of the inclined plane. Civilization depends on the wheelbarrow that the line

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