The Red Wheelbarrow

6 Pages 1507 Words

Red Wheelbarrow


In gazing over Williams Carlos William’s The Red Wheelbarrow I was

dumbfounded. The poem lacks in symbolism as well as meaning, yet gives a series of

images with no conclusion to its original statement. The Red Wheelbarrow poses a

mysterious element to the average, everyday reader. At the end of the poem I was forced

to ask the question, “why does so much depend upon a red wheelbarrow.” In studying

other writers I tried to seek a definitive answer to why Williams wrote this poem. In

further study I asked myself the question, “what (actual) purpose does this red

wheelbarrow serve?”

My metamorphosis began when I read Paulo Freire’s “The Banking Concept of

Education”. He must’ve had something on his mind when he said, “teachers either work

for the liberation of the people-their humanization- or for their domestication, their

domination.” In what could be called an interesting summation in unveiling the negatives

of narrative learning, Freire explains the pitfalls and shortcomings of the “Banking

Education”. His concept stems from the hierarchy of the teacher celebrating “himself to

his students as their necessary opposite; by considering their ignorance absolute, he

justifies his own existence.” In this system the teacher acts as the depositor and the

students, merely receptors. The Banking concept, according to Freire, suffers from an

abnormal amount of pride in that it gives itself the charter to give their educated the title,

“welfare recipients”. These teachers, referred by Freire as oppressors, make it their duty


to change the “incompetent and lazy” by simply perverting their mentality.

The night prior to our reading of Freire I took to the internet to find some sort of

meaning to Williams’ poem. Some websites analyzed the poem’s imagery and others

took a more symbolic pa...