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