poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

The speaker had an affair.

what color are plums? Purple. It is symbolic of lust. To make it feel cold... like something "cold" or "bad" happened... WCW used ICEBOX instead of refridgerator or freezer and the last line makes your spine tingle. And then he adds the psuedo-taunting with adding "and which/you were probably/saving/for breakfast" makes the reader think... "ouch."

It also shows that the speaker enjoyed doing what he did and is proud of it.. "forgive me/they were so delicious" The "forgive me" is almost thrown in there as if it were not meant.. which it's clearly not.

Anyone who says it's a dumb poem, no offense, is pretty ignorant. What poet goes around talking about how good their plums are? haha. Not many. WCW is the master of using imagery and parallelism. It's all about if you respect brilliant technique or not :)

I must say Zoe.. I had a good laugh with your poem. :)

it is a poem about PLUMS. not sex. not virginity, not lust, not innocence, not starvation. the guy ate somebody else's plums. the kind of "oops, i think i ate the leftover pizza you were gonna eat this morning" you write to your roommate when you know he'll be like "humteedoo where did my pizza walk off to?" like e. e. cummings poem about the frog and the lawnmower, people.

*laughs*

:)

What it's "about" can never be fully discerned, but I do see a hint of eroticism here, and something of the hermetic ala Emily Dickinson. By his statement "No ideas but in things", I don't think he meant
"my poems mean nothing and have no recesses of meaning" but by their nature, words as things are ambigous and tend to suggest other things, I suppose the very essence of trope.

Have you seen this magnificent parody on Williams's poem?

This is just to say
by Linda Kemp





I have stolen
the red panties
that were in
the hamper
and which
you were probably
saving
for laundry day.
Forgive me
I had to smell them
they were delicious
so sweet
and so hot.

This poem was actually a note left to WCW's wife on the refrigerator. Sexy or not (matt and mel J), wothy of fame or not (zoe) I still like it.

Isn't WCW one of the poets who heavily used imagism in his poems and teksts? i.e. using realistic images full of meaning, using only the words necessary for giving enough symbolic meaning to a poem? Imagists used images in such a way that they can symbolize different things for different subjective views (a very modernist thing).

I think this poem is an example of this techinique (on eperson only thinks gfood with plums, others sex, etc. etc.). moreover, isn't his statement of "no ideas but in things" the most clear lead to his imagist intentions: showing ideas thorugh concrete imagery?


just a thought....

it's awfully funny to me that WCW was quoted as saying that this poem "is metrically, absolutely regular" when the stanzas have no regularity whatsoever. no two lines follow the same metric form. maybe it's his joke on the interviewer to whom he was speaking....to add my two cents on this poem, i have always thought it to be simply about temptation. at least that is what my 9 year old mind arrived at the first time i read it, and i guess i have just always kept that opinion, probably because it feels more sneaky and fun that way.

Zoe " Here's my little imitation of WCW:

The dishes
were so dirty

I filled the sink
with bubbly water

And washed them
With a sponge."

i think that this actually hits a little on the purpose of the poem.... i beleive that a major part of the poem was how much pleasure is derived from something so simple...

that I too used to read a lot into this poem about just like Mel's prof. Came up with pretty much the same thing. Plums and other fruit had a fairly well understood meaning in a lot of victorian art.

Then I learned that this was actually a note WCW left to his wife on the occasion of his actually eating some plums she had left in the icebox.

I have since endeavored to be more humble about poetry, and as a result have become more cynical about modernism.

Because this is a poem about fruit and sin and forgiveness, one can go back to the original sin--the stealing of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden.

Williams' note-writer knows, before he even takes the fruit from the icebox, that he will be forgiven for his deed. His prayer gives no hint of begging for forgiveness, but rather is an acknowledgement that he was human, and indeed derived pleasure from it.

The plums were meant to be eaten. The fact that the pleasure was stolen, was taken at the moment that it was needed most, makes the fruit all the sweeter.

It is an interesting view of sins of the flesh and forgiveness. We sin--we are impatient, we are selfish, we lust, we take. Do these sins damage the course of humankind? Do they cause death, destruction, pain, unanswerable loss? No. We are made as hungry people. When we satisfy that hunger in our own way, we know we will be forgiven. But asking forgiveness is part of the pleasure of the deed. We not only savor the fruit. We also savor the grace that provides the fruit, and provides the forgiveness.

The irony of the intertwined nature of pleasure and pain, of sin and forgiveness, seems part of the Grand Design. God put the fruit in the garden, created in humans lust for the fruit, punished them for giving in to the lust He made in them, then provided forgiveness for the sin.

See William Butler Yeats exploration of this theology in “Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop:”

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.

Yeats wallows in the foul in his poem; Williams luxuriates in the fair.