So here's the thing about William Carlos Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow. It's a much more interesting poem if it is not even a little bit a metaphor[1].
I think that is the thing it can do that's new and different from what a lot of other poetry, especially at the time, was doing. To be focused on more directly showing, in the way an untrained eye might see, the world of agriculture. We take these things for granted as parts of the natural world, but let's be clear--both the wheelbarrow and the chicken are human inventions! Someone bred the chickens and someone built the wheelbarrow and they both require upkeep, but also by the early 20th century they were both old inventions that had spread all over the world. This means the poem really showcases this scene, this way of seeing, that stretches back many years. It could be set in so many different times and places. The idea of sitting in this moment, so universal in its description across times and cultures and languages (not necessarily across classes, mind) is a sort of portrait of the universality of farming life, agriculture, and agricultural life.
It's more interesting if it's literal.
And also, that makes it insane to me that an entire generation of high school AP English students in the United States of America in the early 2010s were expected to write an entire essay about what the poem means[2]. Because it says what it means! It is about a red wheelbarrow and how important it is! You know, when you have labor to do, and you need to depend upon it.
What depends upon the red wheelbarrow? So much! My hopes and dreams and whether we'll able to eat tomorrow and my back and also all of this manure and all of these bricks and all of my tools and just a bunch of water. You know, so much depends upon it. So much is upon it. And that's all there is to say!
You can link it to a poetic tradition. You can say interesting things about it in context. You can critique the implied universality. We can talk about how many farmers do not use wheelbarrows at all, even when the poem was written. About the size of farm or garden plot probably serviced by a wheelbarrow, and what that means for the class of the poem's speaker. We can talk about the way that this romanticizes a pastoral agricultural life that does not exist as universally as I'd argue the plainness of the poem implies. But I also think there really is something real there, worthy of chewing on, which I just didn't get when I was like 16.
When I and many other kids were made to write an analytical essay just about the poem without bringing in any outside sources. We didn't even have access to any outside sources during the test. What was the College Board hoping these students would say?
The process just forced this engine of analysis in the way of actually reading and seeing the poem. You have a poem that is just about showing the world as it is, for a class of people who are close to the earth, and the way that that life may change less than others. We just didn't have the context for it! We were always going to try and look for a metaphor, and there's just not anything there.
If you just start swapping out nouns for other things that they could be representing, if you start trying to ask, conceptually, what the wheelbarrow represents, you're just asking the question of what depends upon what. Maybe the glazing with rain water could mean something, but it's just a detail in the poem. It's not contributing to the wheelbarrow's function or impeding it. You can imply some things about the conditions for said farmer, whose back is probably exhausted and whose shoes are probably wearing through, but that's not in the poem. You have to bring that yourself to make any metaphor work. You have to first be able to see the literal meaning, to be able to relate to the scene and read into the storytelling there. The poem is not going to do the work of telling you what depends upon a red wheelbarrow, and at 16, for better or for worse, I had never used one!
I think this is a little bit why, when I first read Billy Collins's poem about how students tie poems to a chair trying to beat the answers out of them, I couldn't figure out what he meant[3]. I could kind of understand what torturing the answers out of the poem meant, I could imagine and understand that it was condemning the idea that a poem has one true answer, but I was failing to imagine fully these alternative ways of engaging with poetry. I was failing to imagine any sort of analysis that was not exploitative. And now I know the mouse can be anything! The mouse is just "let me drop a thought that I have had into this poem that feels related"; "let me try and decide what one piece of this metaphor means and then watch my meaning find its way out"; "let me see what that implies about the rest of the poem and decide at the end if that was a path that teaches me anything".
But it took a lot more living to get the the point where I had any mice to put in the red wheelbarrow.
To me, most poetry (or at least most poetry I like) is about focusing on the experience of being in a particular body or having a particular perspective[4]. Like any language, it will require that you have some amount of shared background with the author to make meaning out of the words. As I've become more in tune with my body, with the physical world, with the way that things get from place to place and the means of production and the way things age and can or can't be mended, I find myself getting a lot more out of poetry. I bring myself to fill in between the lines, and I think a good poem leaves enough room to invite that.
Maybe the way we teach poetry has changed since I was in high school. I suppose even if this is supposed to be partly a rallying cry for choosing to teach poetry that pushes your audience's boundaries but still has enough relatable content to hold onto, it is simultaneously evidence that I'm still thinking about The Red Wheelbarrow a decade later and that it's still always the first poem that comes to mind when I need one. Even more than Ozymandias, which I could sink my teeth into at the time. Maybe I wrote this entire blog post just to have somewhere to put the argument I didn't get into with Brad Buchanan (whose work I adore and who puts on an absolutely phenomenal reading) when he said over a late-night beer that meaningful, human poetry has to focus on the emotional world and not the world of objects, as if the world of objects is not irrevocably human. As if we aren't all objects in the material world.
When I sat down to write this, I thought it was going to be a treatise on how you must first embody the world a poem is set in to be able to use it metaphorically, but it probably doesn't do a very good job of that. I guess, maybe, mostly, this is an invitation to memorize a poem, and to take it seriously, and to see what doors that opens up in your own head.
I don't know if you've ever sat down and memorized a sentence or a handful of sentences on purpose and then remembered them for at least a decade as your entire personality and worldview changed, thus also changing the meaning of those sentences to you (maybe something from a religious text), but if you're confused by the intense energy I'm bringing to this extremely plain poem, it may help to imagine I'm talking about whatever those sentences are for you. Alternatively, it might help if you throw out your back. I feel like that really changed my relationship with wheelbarrows. ↩︎
If you're not familiar with the Advanced Placement English exams or they've changed them since I took mine, just know that I'm talking about a deeply formative late-teen memory in which I was made to memorize William Carlos Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow, one of the only poems I still know by heart, because I was going to have to write an essay about it during a standardized test at the end of the year, on a Saturday. Without having access to the poem or literally any other sources. This was something that every highschool upperclassman in the US trying to get college credit for their English class did that year. For the exact same sixteen word poem. I thought this was a deeply stupid task at the time, for different reasons than I now think this was a deeply stupid task. My retroactive apologies to the extremely late William Carlos Williams for being a teenaged little shit. ↩︎
This is funny for several reasons. For one, the poem now means so much to me and I frequently want to send it to everyone I've ever met who talks about not getting poetry. For another, I'm sure that my teenaged self was part of a long history of the people that poem was about getting the poem Just Enough to think but not ask "wait what does it even mean to waterski on a poem?" and then walking away feeling defeated by the riddle. To be honest that's still the image in the poem I find least evocative. Maybe if I actually went waterskiing I'd find it more coherent. ↩︎
Neither of which has to be human! Or even alive! ↩︎