My Thoughts on the poem The Red Wheelbarrow by poet William Carlos Williams The poem: The Red Wheelbarrow

By William Carlos Williams so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. My Thoughts: The poem, The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams, is a quaint little poem that barely fits the profile of poetry. It feels more like a short prose or sentence that is broken up to look like a poem. The poem has four stanzas that have four words each, with the last word forming a second line of every stanza. This simple, direct and very descriptive poem is all about a red wheelbarrow that is standing, apparently awaiting its next use, by the chicken coop. The poet never really describes the wheelbarrow directly, other than saying that it is a red wheel-barrow. He uses the things that surround the wheelbarrow for painting a very bright and beautiful picture of a very mundane and commonly ignoreduntil-needed object. As in a painting, though the wheel barrow is the main object, it is framed and enhanced by the little objects around it, such as how the rain-water transforms the dull and dirty wheelbarrow into a bright and new glazed wheel-barrow. The white chickens are meant to make the reader focus towards the big and very red wheel barrow, as compared to the chickens that are small and white. In short, the poet has used words of poetry to paint an imaginative and pretty picture of the wheelbarrow. He invites the reader to imagine and picture for themselves a wheelbarrow, standing in the rain, probably on a farm, with white chickens all around it, may be trying to hide near or under it as a protection from the rain. There may be many meanings and metaphors that could be pulled out from a poem such as this, but in this poem I believe that maybe, Williams just wanted to show us what he saw when he saw a red wheel-barrow, glazed with rain-water.