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Williams wrote “The Red Wheelbarrow” in free verse, which means the poem doesn’t conform to a strict metrical scheme. Traditional methods of scansion confirm that the poem’s meter is irregular throughout. As an example, consider the first two stanzas (lines 1–4):

     so much de-pends
     up-on

     a red wheel
     bar-row

The opening stanza consists of a spondee (stressed–stressed) followed by two iambs (unstressed–stressed). The second stanza is more difficult to analyze with scansion. It clearly begins with an iamb and ends with a trochee (stressed–unstressed), but there’s a lone stressed syllable in the middle. We could technically read “wheel” as a trochee with the unstressed syllable cut off, but such a reading is strained and doesn’t help much in understanding the meter. Thus, more helpful than traditional scansion is a simple analysis of the poem’s syllabic structure. Whereas the second line of every stanza consists of just two syllables, the first lines all have either three or four syllables, and they are distributed in an inverted pattern: 4–3–3–4. The tight control of this structure reveals the precision at the heart of Williams’s seemingly straightforward and conversational poem.

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