Favorite Poem (1): The Red Wheelbarrow

"the red wheelbarrow"

-William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel


barrow

glazed with rain


water

beside the white


chickens.

I first read this poem when I was a freshman, and I remember I hated it. I didn’t believe that it was poetry because it didn’t fit my definition of a poem. But, coming across this again recently, I realize that it actually is the definition of a poem. Williams does an excellent job of describing the image of a flawless red wheelbarrow covered in enough water that it has a metallic sheen next to a flock of chickens. His scene contains no disorder, no evidence of anything out of place. It reminds me of movies that have a setting in which all the colors have no blemishes or mixtures of any kind. Everything in this poem creates the sensation of a perfect world, completely dependent on this perfection; hence “so much depends upon”. Williams is making the argument that we all strive for this level of flawlessness but in the end it just doesn’t visualize itself realistically.