Entry 407 — “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Visited Yet Again
I’m not sure how regular a blogger I’ll be for a while, but here’s another entry.
A number of years back, I did what I thought was a superior examination of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Yesterday, thinking again about it–because I had the sudden idea that maybe I’d written enough little essays like it for a book-length collection of essays (later finding out I was wrong)–a simple explication of it occurred to me: “so much depends upon (the fact that the everyday world can contain such beauty as) a (simple) red wheel barrow, glazed with rain water, beside white chickens.” After writing that, I wonder if I didn’t already have it in my original essay. I certainly said that’s what the poem most simply said, but I don’t think I then so concisely got its meaning (for me–always remember that, kids; but also remember that some engagents’ meanings are much better than everyone else’s).
Yes, it has many further meanings. But that’s its core meaning.
In any case, after coming up with the explication just given, I thought a while about how much I enjoy explicating and otherwise critically dealing with poems, and–for the millionth time–about my belief that a good critique is as valuable as the poem it critiques. Is, in fact, a conceptual variation on the poem it critiques, almost as enrichingly like/unlike it as a musical composition like Scheherazade is enrichingly like/unlike the literary work that inspired it. It “spoils” the poem only the way scientific knowledge of the moon robs nullosophers of its magic.
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What’s better: to know a lot of poems by others reasonably well, or know just a few extremely well? Probably neither, but I certainly hope that the few poems by others I know, I know extremely well. Some of them, I’m sure I do. And by “extremely well,” I mean as well as anyone. It bothers me that I keep returning to them so often. But every once in a while, I tackle a new poem or two.