The Power of Sixteen Words Exposed in The Red Wheelbarrow Essay

The Power of Sixteen Words Exposed in The Red Wheelbarrow William Carlos Williams's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" is extraordinary for what it accomplishes within its eight short lines. It is exactly one sentence long, sixteen words. Numbers like that wouldn't normally be important in the consideration of a poem's merit, but "The Red Wheelbarrow" begs to be noticed for its length (or, rather, its lack of length) and for the arrangement of its sixteen words on the page. In fact, an interesting experiment would be to give a group of people the words that Williams uses and ask them to arrange the words into the structure of a poem. How many people would do as Williams does and end up with four almost perfectly congruent stanzas, each one with three words in the first line and one word in the second line? The syllable count in Williams's arrangement is not perfectly congruent, but it is harmoniously different: the two longer stanzas (by only one syllable apiece) sandwich the two shorter stanzas. A sentence which would otherwise sprawl across the page, nearly without structure (it has no punctuation or end-mark), so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. is poured into a form of mathematical precision: Instead of flying through the sentence, as one would do if it were simply written in a linear way across the page, the reader tends to stop at each line-break and at every stanza break to contemplate how each stanza is different. And there is a difference. The first stanza is abstract, calling upon the reader to agree to the notion that something depends on... ...ores (involving the red wheelbarrow, perhaps)? In the back room, looking out the window? In any case, the scene we look at is framed and self-contained by the structure of the poem, and all the sensory information of the objects we look at comes through that frame, opens up through that frame. Perhaps the real "dependency" in this poem is not that the speaker of the poem depends on the wheelbarrow as a farmer depends on his tools, although that is certainly part of it. Perhaps the real "so much depends / upon" is that the speaker, the beholder through the frame (and, by extension, the reader of the poem) knows that he or she is alive, that his or her senses are responding to the things of this world, and that, in a sense, the world -- in all its variety and beauty and variegation, even in the most mundane things -- responds to the person who has eyes to see.