The Red Wheelbarrow Essay Sample

The poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is probably among the shortest poems in American literature. The speaker of the poem is the poet himself. He is associated with the wheelbarrow, a machine, which is described by the poet. It is red, it has been cleaned due to the rain water (the rain water is subordinate) or it is supporting element in the poem.
The language is so simple. The poem incorporates four short stanzas. The stanzas are very small; just four words stanza. There are total sixteen words in the poem but they are very effective to describe the farm scene. The symbols used in the poem signify that Williams wants to tell something more than just telling about a rainy day. The life of the wheelbarrow is not simple. It has to traverse many difficult paths in its life. Hence the red colour can be interpreted as a symbol of a hardship of the person. The rain here symbolizes the process of cleansing everything. Sometimes our mind is full with sorrow and sometimes we can’t supress the sorrow and tears burst out from our eyes and after the cry our mind feels relax and light. Just like the tears make our mind clear, the rain has cleared the hardship of the wheelbarrow.
The last line there is a reference of the chickens. Chickens are the symbols our friends in distress, who come to us and give us solace and an energy to fight against the hardships of our life. Thus the symbolic interpretation is that nothing is permanent in the world. Like the changing weather, the situations in our life also change.
The poem is written in the free verse. If we observe the arrangement of the words in each stanza (three in first line and one word in the second line), we can see that the structure itself is like a wheelbarrow. Moreover, the words have a particular pattern. They appear in pairs; i.e. depends-upon, wheel-barrow, rain-water, and white-chickens. But they are not exactly arranged in pairs but they are split from each other. The word ‘depends’, ‘wheel’ ‘rain’ and white appear in the first line and they are split by their pairs in the second line. This is for the pause. Otherwise we cannot find anywhere the punctuation marks in the poem.
Though the poem is very short, it has a depth in his thoughts which makes us to study it from different perspectives.