16 pages • 32 minutes read

The Red Wheelbarrow

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

White Chickens

Given their striking white color, the chickens call attention to themselves and capture the poet’s attention. Within the tight, spare, clean argument of Williams’ poem, the chickens symbolize a necessary element of animation and the gift of animation all around.

The chickens, alone of the few images the poet notes, are capable of movement and gift the otherwise static tableau with the spark of life. Chickens might have erratic or graceless movements, but unlike the wheelbarrow, they move of their own accord. However, that movement is hardly the stuff of poetry. Unlike other birds, chickens are essentially flightless, content to peck and roam about the same space as humans in awkward choreography. They do not achieve the elegant beauty of other birds. As such, the chickens inspire less the idea of nature’s beauty as they do the concept intrinsic to the Zen-like wisdom of the poem itself: They are beauty unnoticed. Admire, the poet argues, the sheer chicken-ness of the chicken. If chickens can merit elevation into the grace, structure, and music of a poem, then surely, the poem argues, the world itself opens up with limitless possibilities.

Rain

The wheelbarrow is “glazed with rain” (Line 5). It has been debated whether that rain indicates the wheelbarrow has been neglected and will rust or that the wheelbarrow has been baptized, cleaned up, and reclaimed. Such intellectual debate moves the poem away from what the poem offers, as there is no way to determine which might be the case.

In addition to his background in the hard sciences, with its emphasis on careful observation, Williams was influenced by both photography and painting. The rain water, however, challenges the limits of words to rest contented with the visual. The word “glazed” introduces the sense of touch to the poem’s spare argument, inviting the sensation of interaction beyond what the eye records. The wheelbarrow does not glisten or shine—that would restrict the image to the visual. “Glazed” also introduces texture—the wheelbarrow is slick and slippery to the touch. The poet is not content to stay at the word “rain”—rather the poet adds “water” (Line 6). That adds no content—rain, after all, is rain water—but the word “water” emphasizes the poem’s reach beyond the visual. “Water” expands the registry of the poem to taste as well as to touch and smell—after all, rain does not immediately appeal to the visual. Thus the rain water symbolizes the poet’s invitation to draw on the fullest range of the senses to engage the world.

A Red Wheelbarrow

Williams gave the poem no title, save Poem XXII (the Roman numerals alerting the reader something odd was going on). After an editor titled the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” the poem inspired generations of analyses certain that the wheelbarrow was the poem’s defining symbol. There is of course no reason to invest the wheelbarrow with that significance. The poem could just have easily been titled “White Chickens” or “Rain Water.” Nothing in the poem promotes the wheelbarrow to special significance save that it comes first. Hence the poem has sustained numerous readings of the poem as an analysis of agrarian life, or a celebration of the human urge to create implements to save labor, or nostalgia for simpler times when farms relied on modest tools.