William Carlos Williams: Poems Lesson Plan

Explain how the plums are used as a symbol in “This Is Just To Say.”

The plums symbolize the deep pleasure that can come from an ordinary object. In the poem’s final stanza, the speaker makes it clear how delicious the plums were, and how much they enjoyed eating them. This is why the speaker was so tempted by them in the first place, knowing how delicious they would be. In fact, the speaker allowed himself to succumb to temptation realizing the pleasure he’d get out of it, knowing his partner was saving them, and knowing it was wrong to eat them. Only three fairly basic adjectives are used to describe the feeling of eating them: delicious, sweet, and cold. However,...