This is Just to Say Analysis by William Carlos Williams

Apostrophe

In “This Is Just to Say,” Williams uses apostrophe in a strikingly casual way. Apostrophe (uh-PAW-struh-FEE) is a rhetorical figure in which a speaker makes a direct and explicit address, usually to an absent person or to an object or abstract entity. Poets of every age have used apostrophe, and they’ve done so to a variety of effects. That said, most instances of apostrophe tend to have a rather formal or dramatic quality. Consider the famous opening line of Homer’s Iliad, as translated by Richmond Lattimore: “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles.” Here, the poet directly addresses a goddess, asking for her assistance in telling the epic tale to follow. In Williams’s poem, by contrast, the speaker’s address is somewhat less explicit and far less lofty. For one thing, it isn’t clear that the speaker is addressing another person until halfway through the poem, when they use the word “you” (line 6). For another thing, although we don’t know exactly who the addressee is, they’re likely just a domestic partner or roommate—certainly, they aren’t a god or goddess! The speaker’s confession therefore has an informal quality that renders the use of apostrophe humorously casual.

Consonance

In the poem’s final stanza, Williams employs a device known as consonance to help convey the sense of pleasure the speaker has taken in eating the chilled plums. The term consonance (KON-suh-nense) refers to instances where the same consonant sound repeats in sequential or nearby words, creating a subtle sonic pattern. In contrast to alliteration, which specifically involves repeating sounds at the beginning of sequential or nearby words, consonance occurs whenever repeated sounds appear, whether at the beginning of a word or in the body. This means that consonance is a more general term than alliteration. Put differently, alliteration is a specific type of consonance. For a concrete example, consider the last stanza of “This Is Just to Say” (lines 10–12):

they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Note how an S sound repeats five times in these lines. (Some readers may question the “c” in the middle of the word “delicious,” since for most English speakers that letter sounds more like “sh” than “s.” But arguably, the sounds are close enough to count.) The repeating S sound subtly slows the cadence of these lines, underscoring the enjoyment the speaker experiences while savoring the sweet, cold plums.

Allegory

Allegory (AL-uh-GO-ree) is a term used to describe a narrative that can be interpreted to reveal two distinct but correlated levels of meaning. A common example of allegory is Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. This narrative tells of a man named Christian who travels from the “City of Destruction” to the “Celestial City.” A reader can enjoy Pilgrim’s Progress solely for the adventure that unfolds as Christian makes his way in the world. However, a reader can also interpret a second level of meaning, where Christian is symbolic figure who stands in for all Christian believers. Understood in this way, his journey to the Celestial City is an allegory for every Christian’s spiritual journey toward God. In a similar way, a reader could take “This Is Just to Say” at face value, enjoying it as a poem about the speaker’s guilty pleasure. However, we could also interpret the poem as an allegory for the biblical Fall narrative, in which Adam and Eve committed the first sin by stealing fruit from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. As an allegory, though, the poem is gently ironic, since the speaker doesn’t seem very penitent about their rather minor transgression.

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