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Sara Starling
Fred Taulbee
English 2110 02I
December 4, 2012
A View of Sexuality in William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to
Say”
Poets often use subtle suggestions in their works to allude
to something else. The allusion may be symbolistic such as the
use of the apple in the Adam and Eve story to represent sin or
metaphorical by calling something bad for you cancerous.
Sometimes the meanings are easy to see just by reading and
sometimes they take some inquiring and thinking to arrive at
their underlying implication. One famous poem that seems simple
and brief at first but is full of interesting and complex
meanings is William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say.” A
deeper look into this poem reveals a possible sexual context that
can be seen by many of the references made in the poem.
The poem seems to be simple, about someone apologizing for
eating some fruit left in a refrigerator that someone other than
the speaker intended to eat at a later time. It seems as if the
speaker of the poem could not help themselves and after eating
all of the fruit offers an informal apology for their actions.
The poem is only 12 lines long arranged in three stanzas of four
lines each. When asked what about it makes “This Is Just to Say”
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a poem, William Carlos Williams responded with, “In the first
place, it’s metrically absolutely regular… So, dogmatically
speaking, it has to be a poem because it goes that way, don’t you
see!”[ CITATION Mar85 \l 1033 ] The poem read[ CITATION Bay12 \l
1033 ]:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
