This Is Just to Say

Reading the tiny drama of purloined fruit, the reader would be hard-pressed to recall the historical context against which Williams’s poem emerged. In 1933, when Williams first drafted “This Is Just to Say,” America was in the grip of a decade-long socio-economic disaster. The Great Depression created for Williams’s generation a profound sense of limits, a radical lack of faith in the integrity of hope or the viability of optimism. The 1930s struggled to make some sense of dust bowls and bread lines, shuttered businesses and shattered dreams. By Williams’s own account, as a doctor working the rural outback of northern New Jersey, he often provided his services for barter, accepting, in lieu of cash, food, and the promise of handyman labor. Although university educated, Williams never lost touch with the hard scrapple realities of the Depression. “This Is Just to Say” deliberately, audaciously refuses to engage that bleak historic moment, reflecting rather a much quieter, much less grand historical context: the poet’s own non-descript life of quiet consolations, those delicious plums he so wonderfully, so thoughtlessly ate.

Perhaps the best way to engage the magnitude of Williams’s tiny insight into the satisfying taste of chilled, ripe fruit, however, is to place the poem within its historical context: Williams addressing a nation suddenly impressed by what was gone, suddenly removed from hope, shocked by how quickly, how absolutely the world confirmed pessimism. Within that historical context, Williams, unlike other Modernists of his generation, did not seek to perform some kind of elaborate autopsy on American can-do optimism or its historic slide into economic selfishness but rather reminds the reader how extravagant, how rewarding are those simple objects so near at hand, beyond the reach of even cataclysmic economic collapse. In 1933, a plum cost only seven cents, and yet could provide such a sumptuous experience. For Williams, the plum, unlike the more common fruit (bananas or apples), seemed exotic, and therefore special, a welcome break from the unrelenting tedium of an economic collapse that seemed to promise no end. For a reader in 1934, then, enjoying a sweet plum was respite indeed, like catching a hummable melody in the midst of an otherwise complicated and intimidating very modern symphony. The poem here, so direct in its revelation, so unencumbered by literary decoration, extends the sense of accessible miracles to a culture suddenly reeling in a world decidedly unavailable to miracles.