The Wonder of Ambiguity

Any person with a satisfactory knowledge of a particular language can tell a story in explicit excruciating detail. That person need not have an extensive vocabulary or knack for storytelling, but still the story will be told and the listener will understand it. There is very little interest in those types of stories, perhaps because they require no particular skill to produce, but also because they involve no interaction on the part of the reader. The minimalist style in poems like The Red Wheelbarrow and In a Station of the Metro is appealing précising because the lack of an overriding narrative forced the reader to be an active participant. The first three words of The Red Wheelbarrow “so much depends” immediately draw the reader into the moment described by Williams. As the reader continues, the mind is filled with questions, why does much depend on the red wheelbarrow, how can an inanimate object have this degree of significance? The open structure forces the reader to construct possible situations where a wheelbarrow could have significance, his eye lingers on every word, every choice of line break. Why is there a line break in the word wheelbarrow? Could this signify some characteristic of the object, or does it signify some slowness in the narrator’s mental state. Each detail, the reader decides, must have been mentioned for a reason; the white chickens have some intimate connection to the rain-glazed wheelbarrow. The two lines of In a Station of the Metro pose fewer questions to the reader, but still allow a unique mental picture of the metro station to be painted by each reader. The metaphor for the faces “Petals on a wet, black bough” is unusual and forces the reader to rethink their initial impression of the scene multiple times. The mystery is what makes these poems thought provoking and it is what makes reading them an interesting intellectual exercise.