Poem #6: Response to "This Is Just To Say" by William Carlos Williams

Poem:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Response:

When I first read this poem, I realized how simple it was. As I finished reading the poem though, it seems to me that the poem is actually a written message on the refrigerator to someone. Overall, I believe the message of the poem is definitely giving into your temptations. 

Everyone falls to temptation once in their lives. For instance, you might eat that cake you have been dieting without, but, your temptations become urges to actually eat the cake. However, that is not the only theme I caught in the poem. As I dug more deeper into the poem, I caught allusions to Adam and Eve. Like Adam and Eve who ate the forbidden fruit, the speaker of the poem took plums without asking. It's weird linking this allusion to the poem because the poem is quite simple, but it's the allusion that makes this poem seem more complex. The poem is quite ironic too. When we look at poems, we often look for meanings and start to think complex. However, for this poem, there really is no way to think complex and maybe that was the author's purpose all along. I looked up who William Carlos Williams is and it states, "Often domestic in focus and "remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects," Williams's poetry is also characteristically honest: "There is no optimistic blindness in Williams," wrote Randall Jarrell, "though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness." When I looked at this review on the author, the word "honest" struck me the most. "This Is Just To Say" is blatantly honest and kind of funny also. When we look at the tone of the poem, we also get the tone of the author or the author's personality. William Carlos Williams is a sarcastic and truthful man (maybe that's why he didn't blame someone else for eating the plums).

In my TPCASTT I wrote that the speaker seems to sound like he/she doesn't care about eating the plums but wants the person who was saving them to forgive him/her. On the other hand, the author seems to think the idea of stealing someone else's breakfast is quite funny and something to laugh about (which is the personality of the author after all). The author also doesn't use diction to get his poem to form a reaction of the reader. The poem is quite simple and gets its' point across. 

Ending this blog post, the themes I came up with were forgiveness(maybe), resistance, urges, giving into temptations, and influences from external forces. Giving into temptations is a huge part of life and often characterizes who a person is. When we look at who the author is, giving into temptations is something to laugh about, almost as though the author and speaker of the poem live a carefree way of life. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that although people always characterize giving into temptations as a bad thing, maybe that isn't always the case.