At first glance we have a literal meaning–on a farm, wheelbarrows are very important. Sure. We can all agree there. But what’s more important is the figurative meaning, which remains a little mysterious; we never know just how much depends on the wheelbarrow, or just what the author has in mind. Agriculture? Human sustenance? The moral values inherent in simple tools and honest labor? The American land itself, the nation as a whole?

Or is the red wheelbarrow secretly plugging a hole in the space-time continuum that would otherwise destroy us all?

Also notice the wheelbarrow-like shape of these couplets, which English teachers have loved pointing out since 1923.

Jay Z explains this line in his autobiography:

“Chips” is slang for money, and championships, which relates to Hakeem Olajuwon, who won multiple championship in the NBA and in college.

Additionally, Hakeem Olajuwon was known for his array of crafty moves in the low post.

Hov, kinda obsessed with people missing him, tells Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton (Jay-Z’s studio engineer/mixer) that he’s going to have a hard time dealing with new MC’s who can’t record as quickly as “one-take” Hov

Prufrock couldn’t seize–or perhaps even recognize–his opportunities (artistic, sexual) in the moment for fear of breaking with convention or committing a faux pas. Now he’s getting older and “the eternal Footman” (death) is holding his coat as if to prepare him for departure. He feels mocked by his own mortality and afraid of having lived an unfulfilled life.

A derisive figure of death makes a contrast with, for example, Emily Dickinson’s respectful figure of death who “kindly stopped for” the speaker. Notably, even a servant-figure—the footman—is laughing at Prufrock.

The Fool or Clown is a stock character in Shakespearean plays. He is sometimes a bumbling rube who talks above his level of understanding (the kind of figure Prufrock seems to have in mind here), but sometimes, as in King Lear and Twelfth Night, he is actually the wisest person in the play. There is no Fool per se in Hamlet: the closest equivalent would be the gravediggers in Act V, so there may be overtones here of mortality or “digging one’s own grave.”

These lines might also evoke Polonius, the advisor to the King in Hamlet, who is ridiculously verbose and long-winded. And a bit obtuse (“O, I am slain!”).

More distantly, the Fool here might recall the Fool in the tarot deck–in keeping with Prufrock’s sense that he is fated to play a humble part. Eliot’s interest in the tarot is famously evidenced in the opening section of The Waste Land. The tarot card also represents a person at a transition point in life. The common representation is a traveler near a precipice, and the interpretation is that he is about to take a chance, whereby he may fly or fall. In the context here, Eliot may be saying that he almost allowed himself to approach a life-changing decision. Almost.

Rhetorically, these lines are an example of the figure chiasmus, with the inverted repetition of “At time” and “almost” as “almost, at times.” The figure has the effect of calling the statement into question: were the times when he was “ridiculous” also the times when he was “the Fool”? This helps to accentuate the several senses of “Fool” (Shakespearean/tarot/social-misfit) at play in the passage.

On the Rider-Waite tarot deck (and other depictions) the Fool is shown to hold his head high above the world, carrying a light burden, not noticing that he wanders toward the edge of a precipice. Though it cannot be said that Prufrock holds his head high in his “current” state, he may have once lived in luxury as such. However, now he finds himself fallen and miserable, and his “burden” is more of a trouble, or at least a reminder of trouble.