Definition of Word Order

Poetry can be like a recipe. If you were making a cake, you would first mix the dry ingredients together; then you would cream butter and sugar together, then add eggs, then stir the dry ingredients in. Why wouldn't you just drop all of the ingredients into a big bowl at the same time and mix? You'd end up with a lumpy mess, and no one wants a cake, or a poem, to be a lumpy mess. Word order matters—sometimes for clarity of meaning (a solo guitar isn't the same as a guitar solo) and sometimes for effect ("a dying man" is roughly the same as "a man, dying," but the effect of the word order matters). There are many different ways to order words and communicate approximately the same meaning, so readers should always question why poets have chosen a particular order, whether the choice is conventional or just the opposite.

Word Order Exercise

“The Red Wheelbarrow,” a famous poem by William Carlos Williams, reads:

Readers of this poem might wonder if anything really depends on the red wheelbarrow. Try altering the word order, though: What could you change without disrupting the sense of the poem? The whole poem depends on the red wheelbarrow. Maybe you came up with this:

But does the title allow you to do that? And wouldn’t it be possible for a reader to say that the rainwater glazes the chickens as well as the wheelbarrow in your version?

INSTRUCTIONS

Take the following poem and change around its word order as much as you are comfortable with. Then compare your version to the original. You haven't gained any words and you haven't lost any words, but what is different? Is there a new effect, a shift in emphasis?

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