150 PA RT T W O
on a wheelbarrow and rainwater and white chickens—or on “wheel / barrow”
and “rain / water” and “white / chickens,” words as musical pulses, daubs of
paint disclosing everyday things.
Whatever depends depends on seeing those things afresh by saying them
anew. “When we name it, life exists,” in Spring and All, a claim exceeded
only by Blake ’s “Where man is not, nature is barren.” Williams knew that
Life, reality, nature, however we call what ’s not our sole private selves, does
possess “independent existence.” We can’t know things themselves, we can
only awaken a sense of them. Name “the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf ” and “It
quickens.”
As for “The Red Wheelbarrow,” these seven or eight seconds have garnered
proverbial force because and in spite of easy access. Seen farmwise, the bar-
row, water, and chickens matter a good deal. But “red”? “glazed”? “white”?
That excitement springs the new world to our windows. Williams prized early
English words and the roughhewn compounds he coined, like “weedstalks”
and “seedhusks” in “To Waken an Old Lady.” Breaking “wheel / barrow” and
“rain / water” turns what ’s familiar into something strange and fresh, with a
“red wheel” spinning radiant for a moment while “rain” and “white” glisten
before going commonplace.
Call this poem mundane, unadorned, simply reporting what ’s out there. But
even its stance on the page, those shaped stanzas, shiver with extra purpose.
Four times running we see four or three syllables over two, maybe wheelbarrow-
shaped. And take “glazed,” a word of many uses: doughnuts and pie, pottery
and fine majolica, oil paintings, snow, eyes. Williams liked this word. Elsewhere
Spring and All features a “broken plate / glazed with a rose,” and an old lady
wakens to birds “skimming / bare trees / above a snow glaze.” Translating
“The Red Wheelbarrow,” Latin American poets enhance the scene: Ernesto
Cardenal’s glazed wheelbarrow is reluciente, shining like a halo or the family
silver, while Octavio Paz’s is barnizada, varnished. For Williams the barrow’s
deceptively simple: shining, yes, in the light this poem draws onto itself, yet
it ’s a common light, as on frozen snow or fresh-baked pie. “Glazed” belongs
to a thriving old Indo-European family: glass, gloss, gleam, glow, glare, glint,
glitter, glisten, glimpse, glance, glide, glee, glad, gold. In this moment, this
wheelbarrow stands radiantly for itself.
Williams does not like “like,” the simile for knowing ourselves via nature.
Likening emotions “such as anger with lightning, flowers with love,” he thought
an empty effort.
—Say it, no ideas but in things—