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As a free-verse poem, “This Is Just to Say” doesn’t feature obvious rhymes. The lack of a regular rhyme helps ensure that the poem’s language remains straightforward and naturalistic. Williams numbered among many other poets in the early twentieth century who resisted the convention of rhymed verse. Whereas poets from previous eras tended to treat rhyme as a fundamental poetic technique, experimental poets like Williams increasingly felt that rhyme introduced too much artifice. Therefore, to evoke the cadences of ordinary speech, Williams avoided obvious rhymes in “This Is Just to Say.” However, the reader who attends to the poem with a keen ear may detect two slant rhymes. A slant rhyme is an imperfect form of rhyme in which two sounds merely approximate one another. The first slant rhyme in the poem appears in the opening stanza (lines 1–4):

     I have eaten
     the plums 
     that were in
     the icebox

Although not exact, the sound of “eaten” and “were in” approximate one another. A similar approximation occurs between two later lines: “you were probably” (line 6) and “Forgive me” (line 9). These two uses of slant rhyme allow Williams to invest the language with a poetic quality, but in a way that doesn’t draw too much attention to itself.

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