This Is Just to Say

Much to the chagrin of earnest and well-intentioned literature instructors, dogged graduate students, and other assorted professional readers, sometimes a plum is, well, a fruit, sometimes an icebox is a kitchen appliance, and sometimes a contrite husband is just that, a husband sheepishly and unironically apologizing for a transgression that is, in the scheme of domestic antagonisms, wonderfully minor. To overburden the slender poem with labored analyses that assume (and in turn insist) that a poem has to mean, that it cannot possibly be about what it is so clearly—and wonderfully—about is to violate the most basic contract between a reader and a writer. The poem reminds readers that writers do not obfuscate, they do not play clever and self-involved games hiding things in texts for beleaguered and frustrated readers to find, like vaguely malevolent parents hiding colorful Easter eggs in places so obscure they can enjoy the sweaty frustration of their children. Whatever the era, whatever the genre, since Antiquity, writers have been in the business of sharing insights into the human condition with an interested, non-judgmental, non-antagonistic, unnamed but very real reader. Ultimately Williams’s poem is less about the imported nuances of the dynamic between a (presumed) husband and wife—that narrative, after all, is happily irrelevant to the poem and entirely extra-textual—and more about those plums, so sweet, so delicious, so chilled, and so there.

The poem, written out, is exactly what it reads to be, an apologetic note left in a moment of soft guilt, a note presumably that the recipient, later that morning, will find more comic than criminal, more annoying than infuriating, more mischievous than vexing. If the poem does not provide any context to give insight into the relationship here, then that relationship must not be central to the poem and divining the nature of that relationship becomes more a parlor game, a self-sustaining and self-justifying expression of the reader’s cleverness than an analysis of the poem. The poem ignores such relationship anatomy—all the reader gets is the happy and gentle collision between two pronouns: I and you, who share a common appliance.

If the characters, such as they are, are not germane to the poem, is the fruit? Plums are plums. Unlike more symbolically weighted fruit, for instance apples or grapes which have so often been used in literature they have accumulated levels of ready-made suggestion, a plum has no such literary ancestry. They are free to be, well, fruit in this guy’s icebox, free to be exactly what they are, sweet, delicious, chilled, and gloriously, unapologetically tempting. What the poem tacitly asks then is whether the reader can live simply and gloriously in the world they inhabit, a world where the accidental collision of shapes, colors, textures, the wonderfully ample, sensuous abundance all around, these carelessly strewn objects that make up a decidedly not symbolic landscape, can create and sustain a logic and grace unto themselves without demanding them into meaning. The plums matter because they are plums and not because they are intricate and subtle symbols of domestic aggression, selfishness, greed, or sexual license. Of course, the poem does not forbid such extravagant cerebral gamesplaying—but the poem is less an invitation to conjure elaborate intellectual solutions and more an invitation to relax into an everyday world where the sweet taste of a plum you were not expecting to enjoy may be as close to heaven as you can expect to be or even need to be.

The poem then is a rethinking of poetry itself. The poem happily and deliberately defies expectations of traditional poetry, the language is direct, accessible, unencumbered by ornamental lyrical effects. Although it looks like a poem—three stanzas all shaped into the architecture appropriate to poetry—it certainly does not sound like a poem (Williams himself in his later years, when he undertook numerous highly successful reading tours to college campuses, relished reading the poem. Fifteen seconds after finishing, with gentle self-deprecating mockery, he’d offer to read it again). The poem offers a chance to hear the subtle music and complicated sonic effects of conversational language everyone takes for granted in the busy communication medium of everyday life. Slow down, the poem suggests, listen to how subtle is the aural weave of the interplay of words we all use every day without hearing the music we produce. If filching some fruit from a refrigerator during some pre-dawn raid is worth the investment of poetry, then the poem, in turn, casts about the entire range of the daily busyness of our lives the potential to be enchanted into poetry. Ironing a shirt? Certainly. Cleaning the oven? Absolutely. Raking through a litter box—yes, if you have a generous and open eye, a vulnerable and beating heart, and are willing to live not in anticipation of wonder, which is the dreary work of priests and poets, but rather in the magic fulfillment of experience itself.

In the end, then, there is nothing “just” about what the poet offers, nothing trivial, nothing off the cuff. The poem is an invitation to do nothing less than live in the sublime urgency of a now that all around does not justify into the claustrophobic and joyless search for meaning (that is the oppressive business of literature classes) but rather expands into the happy and wry enjoyment of suggestion.