William Carlos Williams This Is Just To Say

The concept of the form of a poem being an ‘architecture’; a stable and concrete structure, which ultimately serves to support the content contained within the poem. This implies that form is a necessity; a strong base of which the meaning of the poem should be built upon. Arguably, this reduces any reading of a piece of poetry to its component parts. In this essay I’m going to argue against this reductionist point of view; exploring how the deconstruction or ‘de-spiriting’ of the architectural importance of the form can, in fact, have a greater bearing on the content and meaning of the poem than the presence of form itself. I will explore how this idea of the ‘anti-form’ can heighten the senses and make the reader much more aware of the complexity

Structurally on the page, the poem notably stands out on lines 6 and 10, highlighting the words ‘probably’ (l.6) and ‘delicious’ (l.10). The absence of obvious form such as rhyme, rhythm or punctuation aids our investigation and identification of these words much more. When reading the poem, the rest of the lines fit with a neat and narrow structure on the page, therefore even through simply looking at the poem without reading it these words become highlighted. The adverb ‘probably’ highlights the intentions of the speaker over taking the plum, ‘probably’ implies a knowledge and defiance of what their morals said were the right thing to do i.e. knowing it was wrong to take the plum. The fact that this word is extended from the narrow format of the rest of the stanza makes it much more distinguishable, its lack of formal regularity is what discriminates it from the rest of the words in the stanza; placing far greater importance on the word. We can interpret this as the speaker’s admittance and acknowledgment of

Once again the final word ‘cold’ (l.12) not only places emphasis on the word ‘cold’ which links to the reference to the ‘icebox’ at the beginning of the poem (l.4). There is an expectance, just as in Bernstein’s poem that for literature to end, it requires a full stop to clarify its finality. This lack of punctuation leaves the reader in a state of suspense, and question of what the consequence of eating these plums were, we’re left to wonder whether the speaker is held responsible for their actions or not. We are also in fact reminded of this ‘cold’ ‘icebox’ where the plums were found, the speaker actively takes us back to the ice box the through the sensational reminder of the plum’s coldness, as semantically they fit together. Perhaps this ending implies a smugness from the speaker as they are showing that they knew that taking the plums would be wrong but went ahead with taking them anyway. This same effect couldn’t be achieved if complied with the formal element of punctuation, as it would formalise the ending of the poem; bringing it to an abrupt ending. The lack of form in this poem, therefore, helps to extend its content and meaning beyond the barriers of the page, we are able to identify the subtle elements of the poem which convey the content, which arguably wouldn’t have been as obvious or successful without the absence of the