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Despite the deceptively simple language of the poem, “This Is Just to Say” has a symbolically significant structure that unfolds across its three stanzas. This structure at once echoes and gently rebuffs the Catholic rites of confession, reflection, and repentance. In Catholicism, believers periodically confess their sins to a representative of the Church, typically a priest. After reflecting on the nature of the sin confessed, the priest will tell the sinner how to repent. The sinner will then perform the prescribed acts of penitence to cleanse their soul of all wrongdoing. The overall structure of Williams’s poem follows this three-part process of confession, reflection, and repentance, and each stanza represents one part of this process. In the first stanza, the speaker makes a confession: “I have eaten / the plums” (lines 1–2). The speaker then reflects on the consequences of their actions, recognizing that “you were probably / saving [the plums] / for breakfast” (lines 6–8). The final stanza begins with explicit words of repentance: “Forgive me” (line 9). However, instead of performing a real act of penitence, the speaker ends up breaking with the traditional structure of confession and concludes by insisting on the pleasure they took in their “sin.”

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