"This Is Just to Say," first published in 1934, is a poem by American author William Carlos Williams about a man who has eaten someone else's plums. Williams was a major poet commonly noted for his involvement with the Imagism and Modernism movements. Along with poets like H.D. and Amy Lowell, Williams tried to find the most immediate means of communicating imagery. His work often strove for a direct simplicity that bordered on colloquialism. In this way, he was reacting strongly against what he perceived to be the excesses of Romantic and Victorian poetry. The texture of this poem is largely informed by this goal. In very plain language, it recounts the speaker's guilt over eating someone else's plums. The commonly told story of the poem's inception says that Williams had the idea for the piece after reading a note that his wife left for him on the kitchen counter. He sought to recreate its tone and syntax in verse.
In three short stanzas, the poem reads like a note of apology. The speaker states that he has eaten plums from the refrigerator. He then comments that, unfortunately, these were probably being saved for breakfast by the person he is addressing. Finally, he apologizes, but wistfully notes that the plums were incredibly delicious. The poem is written in free verse, contains no punctuation, and follows no formal rhyme scheme. Each of its lines is quite brief, never running longer than five syllables. The poem never reaches for abstraction, and seems almost entirely concerned with maintaining a tone of direct address. The speaker is apologizing to an unseen person whose plums he believes he has eaten. Given some biographical context (and the fact that they share an "icebox") it is reasonable to assume that the speaker is Williams and that his wife is the one who was saving the plums. As the title implies, the poem tries to stick to the basics. The speaker is just trying to say he has eaten her plums, offering a short apology and explanation.
