18 pages • 36 minutes read
This Is Just to Say
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Reply” by Flossie Williams (1982)
This is the hilarious response penned by Williams’s wife after she found her plums gone. At once wry and loving, at once harshly critical and happily playful, the response points out to Williams that she had made sandwiches for his lunch and that there were plenty of blueberries and even yogurt in the icebox for his breakfast. In other words, there was no reason to mess with my plums. Williams claims he took his wife’s note as is and simply restructured her message into quatrains.
“Danse Russe” by William Carlos Williams (1916)
An early poem, another morning moment, “Danse Russe” celebrates the poet, alone, dancing naked in front of his bedroom mirror, relishing the expression of his body’s liberation without anyone watching, judging. He dubs himself “the happy genius” of his own home. The celebration of that moment, as much selfish and emancipating, foreshadows the moment of quiet theft of the plums and the celebration then of the sensuous delight. Set against an emerging splendid sunrise, the emotional joy captures the feel of “This Is Just to Say.”
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost (1923)
A formidable response to Williams’s child-like enchantment with the momentary delight in the chilled plums, Frost, a fellow Modernist but one pulled more by the dark wasteland logic of anxiety and despair, here points out that the stunning beauty of a spring morning (and the delight it gives to those lucky few alert enough and open enough to take it all in), can never last, that too soon the trees will ease from blossoms to pedestrian leaves, that even Eden sank into “grief.” Even as Williams relishes the momentary delight, Frost sternly, darkly assures the moment is, in fact, just that.
Further Literary Resources
“'This is Just to Say’ and Flossie Williams’s ‘Reply’” by Ann Fisher-Wirth (1996)
A feminist analysis of Flossie Williams’s response to her husband’s note on the fridge-as-poem, the article examines the unspoken implications of the husband lording over his wife the theft of the fruit she had stored for herself. The article insists that at the emotional center of the speaker’s cavalier attitude is an “uneasy” sense of a woman trapped in a marriage in which she does not have equal say.
“William Carlos Williams, Literacy, and the Imagination” by Francis E. Kazemek (1987)
The article uses the plainsong poetic line of Williams to explore the foundation assumption about language: how words and things are taught to children at the same time, a reality that Williams, in his signature direct diction and accessible syntax, exploits, giving his apparently simple poetic line the feeling of teaching the reader the chance to see world for the first time.
“William Carlos Williams: Rhythm of Ideas” by Hugh Kenner (1983)
A New York Times essay marking the centennial of Williams’s birth, Kenner’s article explores line by line, sometimes word for word, how Williams crafts his own sense of rhythm. Kenner, a respected critic and poet, suggests that key to hearing Williams’s poetry is to track his signature sense of distributing his stresses rather than charting them with predictable regularity typical of more obviously rhythmic poetry. Kenner argues that a Williams poem happens, ultimately, not in the intellect, not in the heart, but in the ear.
Listen to the Poem
Perhaps the most reliable recitation is done by Williams himself to a university audience, available on YouTube. Barely 20 seconds (indeed much to the delight of his audience he reads the poem twice), the poem reveals Williams’s gentle self-deprecating whimsy along with his New Jersey-inflections (note the way he lingers over “delicious” and the two syllables he gives to “say”).
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By William Carlos Williams
