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Assignment for Wednesday

Create a Melody From Story

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
​William Carlos Williams

​

Write a song or tune to tell the story of Thaddeus Lloyd Marshall, Sr.

Use William Carlos Williams’ poem The Red Wheelbarrow to generate the motive or phrases for the melody.
Select the best structure to support your idea.  

William Carlos Williams was a major, 20th century American poet most associated with the schools of modernism and imagism.  His short poems often read like paintings.  

Williams wrote this about the inspiration for his famous poem The Red Wheelbarrow. 

["The Red Wheelbarrow"] sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester. He used to tell me how he had to work in the cold in freezing weather, standing ankle deep in cracked ice packing down the fish. He said he didn’t feel cold. He never felt cold in his life until just recently. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.

The man who had inspired the work was Thaddeus Lloyd Marshall Sr., who lived a few blocks away from Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey and is buried in Ridgelawn Cemetery in neighboring Clifton.
The Red Wheelbarrow
by
William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.
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