Poetry Analysis: "The Red Wheelbarrow" Essay

“The Red Wheelbarrow,” like other Williams poems, is tentative. It lacks punctuation, relies on erratic or unusual lineation, and generally dissolves the traditional boundaries between one thing, or idea, and another.

Would you be willing to give your life to protect something? In the poem, The Highwayman, a girl named Bess was captured by King George’s men. Tim the osler loved Bess, so he wanted to save her. He tried to save her, but was shot by King George’s men in the highway.

Instead of some formal or momentous event, though, the poet asks us to consider, in the second stanza, "a red wheel / barrow," a barnyard device of convenience. The indefinite article, "a," does not exactly make this red wheelbarrow generic, but like the "upon," the article allows for a hint of transcendence: this is not just the wheelbarrow, any old piece of yard or barnyard machinery; it's a wheelbarrow that can stand for something beyond itself. The break that comes between "wheel" and "barrow" causes us to consider the nature of this tool, its barrow-ness and the primitive wheel at its fulcrum. Also, the brevity of the lines calls attention to the weight of a singular word -- like "red." The color is a word that we could normally skip over or barely notice, except that the next stanza turns that color into something else. The red has been "glazed with rain / water." The word "glazed" suggests something cold, hard, enamelled. Although the color red is usually regarded as a warm color, it has been made cool, if not cold, here. The effect of the "rain / water" (the word being broken, as "wheel / barrow" was earlier, with similar effect, our attention being called to its make-up) has been to alter the nature of the red, but also to alter the nature of the wheelbarrow itself. Like an old car in the rain, the wheelbarrow has been transmogrified into something

The poem "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota has inspired reams of analysis and debate and still does to this day. We are presented in James Wright’s poem with several images which are actually distinct, though they are loosely connected by situation, but is for us connected with them by neither logic nor association. A great majority of the images that occur in the poem are based off of the basic senses such as our auditory and visual senses. Although almost basic in a sense, the content of the poem uses our own natural, human senses to express this aura of mediocrity and usualness.

Ben Jonson was said to be born June 11, 1572 in London, England. Jonson was educated at Westminster School by William Camden a classical scholar. Ben Jonson was a big man with a lot of courage. He lived with his mother, but his father; who died a month before his birth. His mother then married a bricklayer, Jonson then drop out of school to work for his stepfather trade. Ben Jonson really did not like the trade his stepfather did so he went off to the army. He was to poor to go to college so he fought in the was for the Dutch freedom from Spain.(434) Jonson married Annie Lewis on November 14, 1594, but there is not a lot know of their marriage. He later had a child who died in 1635 he called him his best piece of work created and he died

The opening of the story is largely involved in characterizing Mrs. Johnson, Dee’s mother and the story’s narrator. More specifically, Mrs. Johnson’s language points to a certain relationship between herself and her physical surroundings: she waits for Dee “in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy” (88). The emphasis on the physical characteristics of the yard, the pleasure in it manifested by the word “so,” points to the attachment that she and Maggie have to their home and to the everyday practice of their lives. The yard, in fact, is “not just a yard. It is like an extended living room” (71), confirming that it exists for her not only as an object of property, but

This gives us a vision of the red wheelbarrow having droplets of water along the sides as well as being partially full of water that the animals as well drank. I can see the birds landing on this glazed wheelbarrow to drink and take baths. The glazed look upon the wheelbarrow can also give it a new fresher look making it shinier than was in its normal dull state (“Exploring Poetry”, 2001.) The “white chickens” (Williams, 1923) are beside the red wheelbarrow as a symbol of color transition given more of a vivid picture to the very short poem. Given the reader more to grasp and paint the brown barn that is just in front of the green fields planted with the vegetables to feed the family supper after working in and on that farm for the day. The color scheme feeds one’s imagination to paint a larger scene and follow the flow of a short poem making into a large masterpiece of words and pictures. Just as Krizer and Mandell did when stating that the colors of and the unrelated objects give is a perceived image that helps the poet to convey an image to our minds and give more meaning to the reading (Krizer & Mandell, 2016). It is also stated that the poem depended upon one line to the next of the four lines total to create a sentence; thus, being a broken sentence within just the first couple lines, one needed the next to complete the sentence (“Exploring Poetry”, 2001). Just as, the lines in

In the poem "The Red Wheelbarrow," written in compliance with the principles of the Imagist movement, William Carlos Williams reflects on the crucial role of a modest tool of ancient origins as the wheelbarrow. This short poem is composed of a single sentence divided into four couplets; it respects a precise metrical convention of three words in the first line and a disyllable in the second. The rigorousness of the metric together with the absence of punctuation and capitalization enhances the symbolism and the imagery, distinctive hallmarks of William Carlos

The imagery used in “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams engages the reader’s sight senses, which allows them to feel that they are experiencing this scene together with the speaker. First of all, Williams uses imagery in the second stanzas of the poem by stating that the wheelbarrow is red. Red can symbolize blood, sacrifice, and love, however in this case, it is highly possible that the colour red is symbolizing the sacrifice of the wheelbarrow. This is because the poem is taken place on a farm, where farmers use the wheelbarrow to help them transport objects from one place to another. Hence, the wheelbarrow is sacrificing its life to help the farmers on the farm. Another piece of imagery is in the the third stanzas where the

Our speaker reflects on how important a certain red wheelbarrow is. This wheelbarrow is wet from a recent rain, and there happen to be white chickens hanging out with the wheelbarrow. The End.

The setting of the backyard paints an image similar to that of the Garden of Eden. The image directly follows the descriptions of the back room of the house, containing the three books, and is described as a “wild garden with a central apple tree and a few straggling bushes with the late tenant’s rusty bicycle pump hidden” (p.449). Though a reader may see the relationship to the Garden of Eden, the rusty bicycle pump initially may come off as unimportant. However, the bicycle pump’s acquired inability to pump up tires represents the foreseeable downfall of the narrator from the state of naivety and

The poem “Red Wheelbarrow” by William Williams refers to a short recollection of certain descriptive terms that have some meaning. For instance, the author starts the poem with the phrase, “so much depends” (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012, p. 563). There must be some special emphasis about the red wheelbarrow that the speaker mentions. Perhaps, since this entire image may indicate that this poem relates to a farm setting, the wheelbarrow would be an indispensable piece of equipment. A wheelbarrow has many uses; to move objects from one location to another, to ease the physical labor that is required when something is too heavy, or it could describe placing many of life’s problems in it and rolling it away for a little while.

The relationship between language and meaning is an important concept in literature and in particular poetry. This relationship is shown through the poems ‘ The Red Wheelbarrow’ by William Carlos Williams (1923) and also ‘ Paradoxes and Oxymorons’ by John Ashbery (1981). In ‘ The Red Wheelbarrow’ , Williams uses many poetic features of language such as assonance and imagery whilst John Ashbery uses predominantly direct address and also poetic fetters such as enjambment. The two poems, at first may not seem to have connections nor similarities, however one poetic feature neither use is a rhyme scheme and also both poets seem to want to involve the reader in some way such as Williams encourages us to use our imagination to find meaning. Similarly Ashbery suggests that without a reader, no meaning can be made of, or interpreted from the poem.

Observation and description are said to function as the core elements of today’s poetry as poets are being led away from their role as teachers of morality. Instead, in many modern poems, it is the description of something mundane that can serve as a trigger for much bigger thoughts yet at the same time allow the mundane to stay as it is, without any overt value judgment. To make such a poem work, the choice of words and descriptions is the most important, and as Trotter remarks regarding a quote by Ted Hughes: “Description [...] is a matter of picking out and remembering significant details: ‘then it is just a matter of presenting those vividly in words’” (246). That presentation is what makes poetry come to life, and in their poems “Digging”,

It was late in the afternoon, and the light was waning. There was a difference in the look of the tree shadows out in the yard. Somewhere in the distance cows were lowing and a little bell was tinkling; now and then a farm-wagon tilted by, and the dust flew; some blue-shirted laborers with shovels over their shoulders plodded past; little swarms of flies were dancing up and down before the peoples ' faces in the soft air. There seemed to be a gentle stir arising over everything for the mere sake of subsidence -- a very premonition of rest and hush and night.