This is Just to Say Analysis by William Carlos Williams

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Difficulty of Resisting Temptation

The speaker of “This Is Just to Say” recounts their failure to resist the temptation to eat plums that were being saved for breakfast the next day. Despite the casual everydayness of such temptation, the speaker’s failure to resist situates them in a long lineage of characters—heroes and commoners alike—who have similarly succumbed to one temptation or another. In the Christian tradition, the paradigmatic story of temptation occurs in the Book of Genesis. That book recounts the tale of the first humans, Adam and Eve, whom God forbade from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Famously failing to resist the temptation of that which God had prohibited, Adam and Eve seized the forbidden fruit and ate it. More than just wanting a particular kind of fruit or the knowledge it would bestow upon them, what really tempted the first humans was the sheer fact of the fruit’s forbiddenness. Like the first humans, the speaker of Williams’s poem stole fruit that wasn’t meant for them. Unlike the first humans, however, the stakes of the speaker’s misconduct are quite low.

The Significance of Life’s Simple Pleasures

The speaker underscores the significance of life’s simple pleasures in the poem’s concluding stanza. After they confess that they’ve taken the plums and then ask for forgiveness, the speaker leaves penitential feelings behind and turns to an expression of enjoyment. They say:

[the plums] were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

By ending the poem with these lines (lines 10–12), the speaker seems to be justifying their act of taking the plums. Although they know it was inconsiderate to have taken the last of the fruit without asking, they suggest that any wrongdoing may be explained by the sheer pleasure the plums can provide. The speaker conjures a sense of this pleasure in the very language of these lines. In particular, the speaker uses repeating S sounds that suggest the kind of sibilance associated with slurping juice from a piece of fruit. The sweet, cold plums are delicious, and that’s reason enough to have taken them. Indeed, the speaker seems to imply that it’s better to enjoy eating the plums in the present moment, rather than keep them stored in the icebox for later.

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