William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow"

Poststructural Pub
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I’m sure a lot of people here’ve read “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a poem by William Carlos Williams.

This weekend I’m holed up in my room because I’m sick and the weather is awful, so I’m reading a lot. I’ve come across this poem again. Here it is for those unfamiliar.

I wonder… What, exactly, makes this poem so great (so great that it’s reprinted and discussed basically everywhere)? Why does it stay in the readers’ minds so long after they’ve read it?

I’m throwing that out there for conversation. That is all.

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http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?p=460029&highlight=white+chickens#460029

It’s cold here too, hope things go well, Jim

P.S. Like that consistent life group.
I know some of those people, e.g. Richard Stith
and I have corresponded about abortion law.

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Colorful Nostalgia.

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W. C. Williams was part of a newer movement in American poetry that wanted to create striking visual imagery that was different than many of the poets of the time. He also looked at the rhythm of American speech and tried to convey it in his poems using spacing and line breaks. He is kind of held up as an example of a style and that poem of his is one of the easiest to demonstrate the style.

But it has been a while since I have read up on him.

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Thank you. I searched ealier before I posted but I must not have searched well enough. Thanks so much.

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Things that are important to me about The Red Wheelbarrow:

–As has been stated, it’s probably the most famous imagist poem. It’s literally nothing but an image. “No ideas but in things,” I think that was Mr. Williams. Most people think all of WC Williams’ work was exactly like that, but that’s far from the truth. He had lots of what I would consider very complicated poems, but he brought an organicness–or an honesty, maybe–to a poem that not many people possess.

–The rhythm of the poem is like fireworks, in my ear. Not talking about the meter, because I don’t think like that. But I can feel the rhythm of this poem in my chest when I read it, and I think it’s mostly the enjambment that does it. Notice “wheel / barrow” and “rain / water,” both compound words broken across a line. It’s subtle but it makes the poem. When I read this poem for the first time, I’d never seen anything like that (and I’d bet not many people had seen anything like it when it was first published).

Here’s my favorite Williams poem:

Poem

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

-W. C. Williams

The rhythm in this poem is immaculate. You can not only see the way the cat is moving in your mind, you can feel it. It’s not only real, it’s part of you. Or that’s how I feel about it. :smiley:

–But I think the reason it’s so often anthologized is that it is exactly opposite what most people think of when they think poetry. Most people think flashy, impenetrable language that has ambiguous meaning and is long and boring. This poem is none of that. Well, some people might think it’s boring, I guess.

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While there’s a poetry thread, I’d like to share my newest poet-obsession. I love John Berryman with my whole body. We read the first 77 Dream Songs in my poetry writing class this semester, and it’s totally changed the way I think about poems and about language. I think I’m the only person in the class that liked them at all. Anyway, here’s my favorite dream song:

Dream Song 29
by John Berryman


There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

If you’d like to hear him read the first dream song (and I’d suggest it, because Berryman is one of the most engaging readers I’ve heard), you can go here. I’d also suggest you read the Wiki about the dream songs if you’re interested in reading them. They’re a little involved, and it might clear some key points up.

Interesting thing about Berryman: where Williams is widely anthologized (Red Wheelbarrow, This Is Just to Say, etc), Berryman is absent from most anthologies. My theory on the matter is that Berryman is viewed as a “difficult” poet (he is, I suppose), and so teachers avoid teaching him. But so many of the poets we read today in anthologies cite Berryman as an influence, it’s hard to think that we can really get a grip on the nature of American poetry while so thoroughly ignoring Berryman’s work. I think it’s tragic. Sure he’s difficult–everyone in my 300-level poetry class agrees–but I think he’s worth the effort. He has gone places that no one before or after has gone.

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I dunno..

http://www.undermilkwood.net/poetry_fernhill.html

The youth of today..

Slan,
D. :wink:

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I’ve never taken to Mr. Thomas’ verse. Perhaps I’m too young. Or perhaps too American? Nonetheless, I will continue to give him a taste from time to time, just to see if my opinion has changed. :slight_smile:

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Dream Song 29
by John Berryman


There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

I love that.

Carol

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Try this,



http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15599

Nothing to do with Welsh men..or women.


A celebrated American dude ( and rightly so!)

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15717

And then, above everybody, so far above, beyond the clouds…

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15529


That will do for starters.

Slan,
D. :wink:

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I’ll be trying on the Clifton (new to me! yay!), but Robert Frost I don’t care for. Yeats is a personal hero.

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Perhaps I’m too young. Or perhaps too American?

Or never grew up on a farm? It sure takes me back…



And then, above everybody, so far above, beyond the clouds…

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15529 >

Oh I LOVE it! Did you ever hear the version that Clandestine set to music?

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That’s a possibility, too.

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As much as I love poetry, I rarely am able to memorize poems. This poem, however, I can recite from memory.

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I can remember The Red Wheelbarrow from “Voices”, the poetry textbook at school. It was nice. Charming. A lovely image.
It doesn’t inspire me to read more of his work though. And in that vein, I’d remark that I have read volumes of e e cumings which were absolutely knockout, and yet the same hackneyed examples of e e cumings appear in anthology after anthology.

It’s Graves and Auden that I prefer. “Sonnets from China” and “The Quest” and that wonderful rambling meditation on Love which goes prosing on for about forty pages. So it’s much too long to quote here.
And Graves’ version of Óisín: “Bravely from fairyland he set forth, on furlough, astride a tall bay given him by the queen, from whose bed he had leapt not half an hour since, whose lily-of-the-vally shone at his helm…”

And I was recommending Dylan Thomas to a barmaid the other week…

And at the moment, I’m going back to Francois Villon. “Ou sont les nieges d’antan…ou sont le prieux Charlemange?”

But I have a friend who is keen on Alexander Pope. She takes a class in “The Rape of the Lock.” I came across this in “The Faber Book of Parodies” and was delighted to discover that she did not know of it:


Imitation of Chaucer

By Alexander Pope

Women ben fulle of Ragerie,
But swinken not sans secresie
Thilke Moral shall ye understand,
From Schoole-boy’s Tale of fayre Irelond:
Which to the Fennes hath him betake,
To filch the grey Duck fro the Lake.
Right then, there passen by the Way
His Aunt, and eke her Daughters tway.
Ducke in his trousers hath he hent,
Not to be spied of Ladies gent.
“But ho! Our Nephew” (crieth one);
“Ho!” quoth another, “Cozen John”;
And stoppen, and laugh, and callen out,–
This sely Clerk full doth lout:
They asken that, and talken this,
“Lo, here is Coz, and here is Miss.”
But, as he glozeth with Speeches soote,
The Ducke sore tickleth his Erse-root:
Fore-piece and buttons all-to-brest,
Forth thrust a white neck, and red crest.
“Te-he,” cry’d Ladies: Clerke naught spake:
Miss star’d, and grey Ducke crieth “Quake”.
“O Moder, Moder,” (quoth the daughter)
“Be thilke same thing Maids longen a’ter?
“Bette is to pine on coals and chalke,
“Then trust on Mon, whose yerde can talke.”

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Williams has just never, ever moved me. My first exposure to his work was the dread Red Wheelbarrow - maybe I spent too much time around chickens and wheelbarrows on my grandfathers farm…but it just doesn’t do anything for me.

I also just don’t like his rhythm…it’s too choppy - not at all like American speech…at least in the midwest.

The cat imagery isn’t bad, but I like this better:

from the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

I do love Berryman, too, Ted Kooser, and quite a few other currently writing American poets. There’s good stuff being written, but it’s too bad it doesn’t receive as much attention as poetry used to receive.

Eric[/quote]

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If someone were to read this poem aloud, would people know that “wheel/barrow” and “rain/water” were broken across lines? Does this mean that this poem was meant to be read more than listened to? Or would the person reading it outloud do something special at those parts, like emphasize “wheel” and “rain”, I don’t know, so the listeners would feel the rhythm? I’m just curious, I don’t know a thing.

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Depends on who’s reading it, I suppose.

As for the other poets mentioned thus far:

Eliot is inspiring, but his writing strikes me as cold and intellectual. And his use of allusion and such–while masterful–is overwrought. Eliot’s work is exactly what Berryman and his contemporaries (if Berryman can be said to have contemporaries) were reacting to. It’s especially obvious in Lowell’s work, because you can see him move from modernist to confessionalist.

Auden is one of those poets whose wit and cleverness can take him anywhere. He is so smart that he can really write just about anything. But, to me, this robs his poetry of a lot of the honesty that I look for in a poem. I suppose it just feels like the poem is so planned as to feel contrived, though his mastery is obvious and enviable.

I’ve not read much of Pope, but The Rape of the Lock is hilarious and insightful.

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Oh, I thought of a good one. I think Wallace Stevens is a dude whose work, much like Williams’ work, is often anthologized, and so he too gets a sort of negative eye among students of poetry. But with Stevens, moreso I think than with Williams, his work is (in my view, anyway) mistaught. I was taught “Anecdote of the Jar” by three different people in high school, and not one of them got to the meat of it, as I see it. Here:

Anecdote of the Jar
by Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.



The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.



It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

I mean, they’d talk about the juxtaposition of natural things and man-made things, and how we don’t value nature, and one of them said something about how we appreciate nature more when we have unnatural things to compare them to, or something. I dunno. All of that may or may not be present in the poem, but it seems secondary. The poem, to me, is more about the way we try to exert control over our surroundings, and then how our own perception of our surroundings allows us to do that. But really, with Stevens, everything he wrote is about language. I mean, all poets write about language, but Stevens does it more overtly. And that’s probably one of the reasons literature students find it so easy to overlook him.

I’d also suggest “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”