This Is Just to Say

“Reply” by Flossie Williams (1982)

This is the hilarious response penned by Williams’s wife after she found her plums gone. At once wry and loving, at once harshly critical and happily playful, the response points out to Williams that she had made sandwiches for his lunch and that there were plenty of blueberries and even yogurt in the icebox for his breakfast. In other words, there was no reason to mess with my plums. Williams claims he took his wife’s note as is and simply restructured her message into quatrains.

“Danse Russe” by William Carlos Williams (1916)

An early poem, another morning moment, “Danse Russe” celebrates the poet, alone, dancing naked in front of his bedroom mirror, relishing the expression of his body’s liberation without anyone watching, judging. He dubs himself “the happy genius” of his own home. The celebration of that moment, as much selfish and emancipating, foreshadows the moment of quiet theft of the plums and the celebration then of the sensuous delight. Set against an emerging splendid sunrise, the emotional joy captures the feel of “This Is Just to Say.”

“Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost (1923)

A formidable response to Williams’s child-like enchantment with the momentary delight in the chilled plums, Frost, a fellow Modernist but one pulled more by the dark wasteland logic of anxiety and despair, here points out that the stunning beauty of a spring morning (and the delight it gives to those lucky few alert enough and open enough to take it all in), can never last, that too soon the trees will ease from blossoms to pedestrian leaves, that even Eden sank into “grief.