This poem is almost, but not quite, a painting in words. Putting aside for the moment the provocative beginning "so much depends upon... "We are stuck by the almost exclusive visual nature of the images that follow. Williams has carefully excluded a number of sensory experiences that might have given the images qualities less like those of painting and more like those of most poems. He uses no words that evoke the sounds of the chickens as they go clucking about their business （ perhaps they are making no sounds） or the sound of the rain as it drums upon the wheelbarrow and drips from its edges （perhaps it has stopped raining）. He evokes no smell of the barnyard or of the ozone that accompanies the rain. The limitations of the imagery suggest an impressionistic painting: the emphasis is on bright color and the arrangement of forms. In the arrangement of the lines, we can see a vague similarity in the triangular shapes of a wheelbarrow and a pecking chicken, thus providing us with an aesthetic experience.
　　Obviously, Williams declares that "human life" depends so much on these things. A wheelbarrow is a basic farm implement associated with the most primitive stage of human tool-making, only one step advanced beyond the use of sledges or unwheeled barrows for dragging heavy loads. Rain water is obviously an essential for farming as for all life, and chickens provide two common foodstuffs in their flesh and in their eggs. Thus, the objects can be seen as among the most basic in providing physical sustenance, and much therefore "depends upon" them.