Because the poem is so simple, it appears to demand creative interactions in the understandable urge to find its meaning, what readers have been doing with (and to) poetry since Antiquity. Williams’ poem has generated two schools of thought that each seek to burden exactly what the spare poem itself resists: the heavy weight of meaning.

The first approach finds the poem addressing the complex community of a contemporary farm. This approach accepts that the poem takes place on a farm, most likely a poultry farm, and that, in turn, the person noting the red wheelbarrow and the chickens must be a farmer. Because there are no quotation marks and no listener defined, the farmer is speculating on how much of the operations of the farm depend on that wheelbarrow there left out in the rain: forgotten, neglected, and apparently near the poultry shed. Thus, the poem celebrates the agrarian life all but disappearing in Williams’ 20th-century world and the pivotal role played by even the most easily ignored implements. More impressive farm implements—a tractor, for instance—pale compared to the function of the wheelbarrow, sturdy and reliable, always there for transporting critical loads about the farmyard. The chickens introduce an element of the natural world, symbolizing all the livestock critical to the community of the farm.