This Is Just to Say

If a poem as slender and as playful as “This Is Just to Say” can be said to explore a specific situation, a specific context, that context would involve the suspiciously whimsical plea for forgiveness from an offending spouse for pilfering fruit from the fridge. Because Williams himself has provided that context—he was leaving one morning, heading off to his patient appointments, and delighted in snatching some plums from the icebox, and, feeling a bit guilty that perhaps his wife might be looking for the same fruit, left the note that, once sculpted into quatrains, became the poem—the poem has excited much analysis about the nature of domestic relationships, the power of asking for forgiveness, and the question of insincere apologies as the speaker appears, in the last quatrain, to offer at best a half-hearted apology. His relish of the chilled fruit, offered so blatantly and unironically, would seem to cast some doubt over the sincerity of his apology. Forgive me, he says, but…wow, the fruit I am guessing you wanted to enjoy for breakfast was good, really sweet and so cold.

Not to burden a note tacked on a refrigerator with too much emotional and psychological weight, the poem explores how in the course of a relationship such moments happen, minor violations, tiny transgressions, that the request for forgiveness here seems whimsical to seek and quite easy to extend. The wink-and-nod feeling of his elaborate plea for forgiveness over such a minor offense assures that this domestic drama will not go beyond the wife reading the note itself. The request for forgiveness posits inevitably a question: what would it say about the relationship had the poet simply scarfed the plums without taking even the moment it took to dash off this wry, if half-hearted, apology? How can the recipient of the note not forgive the writer? He is hardly confessing to infidelity, hardly revealing some disturbing offense that cannot be ignored. Under those circumstances, the slender poem would be thick with irony and heavy with unspoken grudges over a litany of unspoken past offenses kept secret. As it is, Williams elevates to the investment of poetry these casual kitchen tragedies, moments in a relationship, the scores of minor violations, transgressions, and little thieveries that inevitably make up the day-to-day dynamics of an otherwise stable and enduring relationship.