The Wheelbarrow as Extended Single Image: William Carlos Williams’s Potential Ichibutsu Jitate Inheritance from Bashō
“The Red Wheelbarrow” may be as widely misread as Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” though for a different reason: the haiku frame the poem requires to be properly read has not been applied to it.
William Logan’s roughly 10,000-word essay on the poem, collected in Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods (2018), considers it from every conceivable angle — Williams’s aesthetic influences, the hyphenation of “rainwater,” New Jersey handcart ordinances, the history of white chickens, the identification of the wheelbarrow’s owner as Thaddeus Marshall of Rutherford. Logan reads the poem as similar to haiku, comparing it directly to Pound’s In a Station of the Metro: “The controlled image in each is juxtaposed haiku-style with a second; yet Pound’s poem presents the images in a tension that must be negotiated, while Williams offers clichés of the barnyard.” However the haiku model Logan applies is the toriawase model — two distinct images set against each other across a cut. The wheelbarrow and the chickens become juxtaposed elements in Logan’s reading, the way Metro’s faces and petals are.
This Edward Zuk essay from Modern Haiku 44.2 and the broader scholarship around it have established haiku as foundational to William Carlos Williams’s mature aesthetic vision — shaping the three-line stanza form he developed in the variable foot, the immediacy of his common speech, and the compressed-image sensibility that runs through Spring and All and the later work. Haiku, transmitted through the Imagist circles of the 1910s and 1920s, is part of how Williams became Williams. It is striking, then, that the Zuk essay does not examine “The Red Wheelbarrow” — one of Williams’s most famous poems, and the one many readers associate first with American compression. The Red Wheelbarrow went missing from the haiku-framed essay because it doesn’t fit the toriawase model the Imagists had received; an alternative, the ichibutsu jitate frame—a single-image structure that deepens within itself rather than cutting between two images—would have brought the poem into Zuk’s case, but was not in the conversation.
Both treatments share a similar gap. Logan applies haiku to the wheelbarrow poem but only the toriawase version of haiku. Zuk applies haiku to Williams’s larger practice but cannot bring up the wheelbarrow poem because it isn’t toriawase.
Likewise Pound’s In a Station of the Metro — the apparition of these faces in the crowd; / petals on a wet, black bough — is considered the inaugural English example, and the structure it employs is toriawase. The reader assembles the haiku by leaping across the cut. Pound and the Imagists also may have settled almost entirely on juxtaposition because it more easily mapped onto the Cubist and collage logics already in play.
Here we should also note that the best haiku operate and resonate on at least two levels, the literal and the metaphorical. Consider Bashō’s kare eda ni karasu no tomarikeri aki no kure: on a bare branch / a crow has settled — / autumn evening. This is toriawase: (the crow on the branch / the autumn evening), with the cut between them producing the dual-level reading. At the surface, this is present-tense observation: a crow lands on a leafless branch as autumn evening descends. At a second level, the same haiku is metaphor — the poet at middle age settling into his own austerity, the crow as self-portrait, the autumn evening as life-stage. Both readings are the same haiku. The form is structurally capacious enough to hold both simultaneously, and the full reading registers both levels at once. A reader who takes only the surface misses the self-portrait; a reader who takes only the metaphor misses the actual scene Bashō was looking at.
But Bashō’s Shofu school distinguished two structural poles, not one. Kyorai, in Kyoraishō, transmits the distinction: toriawase, the two-image structure that Basil Hall Chamberlain championed and Pound learned, and ichibutsu jitate, the single-image structure where the haiku is built around one continuous object or scene. Ichibutsu jitate remains underrecognized in English haiku scholarship and underpracticed in the poetry itself, in part because the ratio is at least four toriawase haiku to every one ichibutsu jitate haiku in Bashō’s corpus.
The dual-level operation is not however exclusive to toriawase. Consider Bashō’s famous ichibutsu jitate haiku samazama no koto omoidasu sakura kana: various things / brought to mind — / cherry blossoms. At the surface, the haiku is single-image observation — cherry blossoms in bloom triggering memories of Tōdō Yoshitada, the young master and friend whose early death at twenty-five had haunted Bashō ever since. The haiku was composed on Bashō’s return to Iga, on the grounds where they had viewed cherry blossoms together as young men. The blossoms hold what the form will not name. At a second level, the haiku can serve as ars poetica for haiku itself: the cherry blossoms perform what the haiku form performs, holding an enormous magnitude in a small sensory particular, a world in a handful of syllables.
The same pattern also operates in Bashō’s yoku mireba / nazuna hana saku / kakine kana: looking carefully — / a shepherd’s purse blooming / by the hedge. At the surface, looking carefully reveals what attention earns — the small, ordinary shepherd’s purse, a humble weed-flower most passersby overlook, blooming at the hedge that marks the boundary of attended ground. At a second level, the haiku is again ars poetica: yoku mireba names what the haiku poet does, and the shepherd’s purse is what the practice rewards. Where samazama no theorizes haiku’s compression — small particular bearing magnitude — yoku mireba theorizes haiku’s attention — disciplined looking finding what others miss. Together they cover the form’s two essential operations.
Is it possible that Williams learned both modes from further haiku reading? Perhaps he was exposed to some of Bashō’s single-image haiku through a transmission path not yet documented. While a final answer on influences awaits further confirmation from Williams scholars, the thrust of this essay is that “The Red Wheelbarrow” — conspicuously absent from Zuk’s essay because it did not fit the toriawase frame the Imagist reception had built — should be read as an ichibutsu jitate composition, an extended single-image poem operating on both levels of the haiku tradition.
The “The Red Wheelbarrow” runs along the structural axis of ichibutsu jitate: abstraction descending to object, and concrete image extending to scene. So much depends / upon is a magnitude-claim, an assertion as sweeping as Bashō’s various things. The opening makes no specification; so much could be anything — the owner’s livelihood, the aesthetic value of everyday objects, the world’s continued meaning. The phrase opens a semantic space and then refuses to fill it abstractly. A classic bait & switch. What follows is a concrete particular: a red wheel / barrow. The wheelbarrow is not just one example of what so much depends on; it is the totality of what so much depends on. The poem then continues past this resolution: a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens. First the wheelbarrow is presented, then poem deepens within the same scene. The rain glaze extends the wheelbarrow’s surface; the white chickens extend the scene’s color-field and life — neither are juxtaposed against the wheelbarrow but are part of the same yard, the same moment, the same continuous looking.
On the surface level, the poem is shasei (写生, “sketch from life”) — Williams’s careful rendering of Thaddeus Marshall’s actual yard, the elderly African American street vendor whose wheelbarrow and chickens Williams observed during his rounds as a Rutherford physician, identified by Logan in 2015. As Williams himself said: “I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.”
On a second, higher level, the wheelbarrow poem serves as an ars poetica for Imagism. If “The Red Wheelbarrow” is metaphor, the wheelbarrow is the vehicle — both literally and figuratively. A wheelbarrow uses leverage to carry what would be otherwise too heavy or unwieldy; Imagism uses concrete images to do the same work analogically or symbolically, heavy or unwieldy emotions or ideas carried by the images themselves. The chromatic specificity (red, white, the rain glaze) makes the singular particular sensorily complete enough to fill out the scene— a grey wheelbarrow beside grey chickens would do different work. The poem can be read as an ars poetica for Imagism, just as the samazama no haiku can be read as an ars poetica for haiku itself through Bashō’s use of the cherry blossoms at Iga.
With the ichibutsu jitate frame restored, the red wheelbarrow emerges as the American Imagist counterpart to Bashō’s cherry blossoms, glazed with rainwater at the edge of Thaddeus Marshall’s Rutherford, NJ yard.
