The Red Wheelbarrow

Because the poem is so simple, it appears to demand creative interactions in the understandable urge to find its meaning, what readers have been doing with (and to) poetry since Antiquity. Williams’ poem has generated two schools of thought that each seek to burden exactly what the spare poem itself resists: the heavy weight of meaning.

The first approach finds the poem addressing the complex community of a contemporary farm. This approach accepts that the poem takes place on a farm, most likely a poultry farm, and that, in turn, the person noting the red wheelbarrow and the chickens must be a farmer. Because there are no quotation marks and no listener defined, the farmer is speculating on how much of the operations of the farm depend on that wheelbarrow there left out in the rain: forgotten, neglected, and apparently near the poultry shed. Thus, the poem celebrates the agrarian life all but disappearing in Williams’ 20th-century world and the pivotal role played by even the most easily ignored implements. More impressive farm implements—a tractor, for instance—pale compared to the function of the wheelbarrow, sturdy and reliable, always there for transporting critical loads about the farmyard. The chickens introduce an element of the natural world, symbolizing all the livestock critical to the community of the farm. The rain symbolizes the life-giving energy of nature itself. It is then a celebration of the unity of man, animal, and nature that goes into the farming enterprise and a celebration of the small things on a farm that make that unity work.

Another school of thought draws from Williams’ own biography and the oft-repeated narrative he provided to give the poem context and by extension meaning. As a doctor servicing the rural reaches around Passaic, he had occasion to tend a young girl who struggled against a virulent strain of something Williams could not diagnose. In an era when doctors still made house calls, Williams would visit her in her family’s farm and often sit with her and watch helplessly as the sickness threatened her young life. On one occasion, he happened to glance out the bedroom window and saw the wheelbarrow shiny with rain, itself a toy the girl had played with, and the gathering of chickens absently pecking about it. He drew on the ironic juxtaposition of the tragedy unfolding in the darkened bedroom against the bright world outside to symbolize nature’s cool indifference to the girl’s sad dilemma and by extension humanity’s own struggle against mortality.

Of course, both analytical approaches inevitably collapse of their own irony. After all, the poem offers no specific context to sustain either approach. It records no farmer, no chores being executed, no storm, no farm; there is no sick girl, no darkened bedside, no window, no doctor, no patient. In both cases, Williams could easily have provided those elements to create that context. Instead, he offers a haphazard gathering of random objects, presented with a child’s wide-eyed perception, dealing as the poem does with basic colors, lines, and shapes.

The energy of critical interpretation itself is self-sustaining, self-generating, and has little to do with Williams’ quiet snapshot moment. The effort to mine the poem for meaning ignores the simple, complex joy of the poem as a poem and the images as ordinary and easily overlooked objects. The poem then offers a moment of tectonic impact, the genesis of which is irrelevant, to which the poet’s open and alert eye responds and shapes without elaborate ornamentation into the sculpted lines of a poem. It does not matter that the wheelbarrow is red, that the chickens are white, nor that it has just rained—it only matters that the poet’s open eye saw it.

In the end, what depends on the wheelbarrow is not the livelihood of the farmer or even the life of a sick child. The only thing that depends on the red wheelbarrow is the poem itself.