William Carlos Williams wrote “This Is Just to Say” in 1934. Although composed two decades after its heyday, this poem bears all the trademark signs of the Imagist movement. The Imagist movement got its name from the way poets like Williams, Ezra Pound, and others radically reduced the scope of their poems. That is, they sought to focus on a single image—or scene, or experience—and reveal something essential about it using clear and direct language. “This Is Just to Say” clearly adopts the minimalism of Imagist poetics. Most importantly, the poem has a strictly reduced scope. The short verse centers on a speaker who has eaten some plums from an icebox. The speaker acknowledges that they were probably meant to be saved for breakfast, and they express a mild sense of guilt for taking the plums. Even so, the speaker concludes by suggesting that the plums were too delicious to pass up In addition to its reduced scope, the poem features direct and economical language, arranged in short lines of two to five syllables each. And yet, despite its apparently simple style and content, the poem references the biblical story of the Fall, and it’s structured after the Catholic ritual of confession.

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