"This Is Just to Say" - William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was a modernist and imagistic poet whose work is often said to be very honest and realistic. He was also a pediatrician for forty years, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

"This Is Just to Say"

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

This poem, written in the form of a note about having eaten the last plums, is short and sweet, but the diction and formatting of the poem reveals deeper shades of meaning. The speaker states that “I have eaten/ the plums”. By using more formal diction (as opposed to saying – “I ate the plums), it makes having eaten the plums seem like a truly serious matter. In the first stanza, the repetition of “the” shows that the speaker felt the need to define exactly what he ate and from where (“the icebox”) he got it. This may be out of nervous remorse, or to just tell the recipient of the note not to look for the plums. The clarifications continue into the second stanza, but the diction becomes more informal and more colloquial. The speaker ate the plums “you were probably saving for breakfast” instead of the ones you were “likely reserving for breakfast”. This shift to informality shows that in reality, the speaker seems not to be too worried about the wrong he did, or that he is on a personal basis with the person he is writing the note to. The title itself shows that this is just a friendly note to the recipient. While the lines and stanzas are short, only three full sentences are expressed. Having the sentences run into themselves seems to denote the possible trepidation the speaker has for eating the plums, and that is why the plea for forgiveness is left to the end. However, he implies that it wasn’t entirely his fault that he ate the plums. He implies that the blame should be put on the fruit because they were “so sweet/ and so cold” that he could not restrain himself.