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The tone of “The Red Wheelbarrow” is at once calm and agitated, reflective and enigmatic. On the surface, the speaker speaks in a detached way that suggests calm reflection. Their closely observed descriptions of the red wheelbarrow, its rain glaze, and the white chickens lend the poem a placid quality. Williams complements this quality with the formal precision of the stanzas, each of which has exactly four words distributed across two lines in an identical pattern. The strict repetition of this stanza form has a meditative effect. Yet the poem’s formal precision is subtly at odds with the strength of the speaker’s emotional experience. The speaker hints at their feelings in the first stanza:

     so much depends
     upon

The speaker makes the intensity of their feeling clear in their use of the qualifier, “so.” They don’t say, “much depends upon” a red wheelbarrow, they say “so much depends” upon it. Yet the speaker’s intensity of feeling never gets expressed directly in the poem, which leaves an unresolved sense of agitation. We readers are left to dwell on the enigma of what, exactly, depends upon the red wheelbarrow.

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