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 wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens
is poured into a form of mathematical precision:is poured into a form of mathematical precision.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
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 something. But the word is not "on"; it is "upon." The formality of the word "upon" declares that this is important, that our attention is called to what the poet (and the reader) is about to perceive and understand. 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, 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, again, like "wheel / barrow" to 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 new. It doesn't matter whether this is a wooden or steel wheelbarrow: it's shiny and new now, made so by the all-changing rain.
Something else alters our perception of the red wheelbarrow, and that is the juxtaposition of the cold, inanimate barnyard tool with the animate, white, alive, and moving chickens of the last stanza. The red of the wheelbarrow has been made more red, deeper in hue, by the rainwater, and it is also more red because it is sitting next to the white chickens. The chickens, on the other hand, are more white because they are next to the newly refreshed redness of the wheelbarrow. Colors in "The Red Wheelbarrow," then, are not just colors; they attain depth, texture, and life.
A question remains. What on earth depends "upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens"? The poet clearly insists on this dependence, but he leaves us guessing what, exactly, he has in mind. Is it the fact that the wheelbarrow is a machine, something the chicken-farmer depends on, used to transport chicken feed and chicken shit? Or is it something even more mundane than that? Or does the poet mean to suggest that the mundane considerations of life are not truly mundane at all, but somehow transcendent?
The formality of the structure of "The Red Wheelbarrow" forces us to consider the poem as composition, as if it were a painting or a snapshot. The balanced, brief stanzas and lines cause us to pause and consider, as we move through the experience of the wheelbarrow, its textures, colors, hues, shapes, and temperatures. Where are we as we look upon the red wheelbarrow? In the doorway of the farmer's house, waiting for the rain to end so we can go on about our chores (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 come through that frame, open 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 senses are responding to the things of this world out there, 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.