Summary

“This Is Just To Say” is a poem composed of three stanzas with four lines each. The poem’s lines are short and its punctuation is sparse, lacking sentence markers besides the capitalized letter of the third stanza’s first word.

The first stanza introduces the speaker and the situation the poem focuses on: the speaker has eaten plums which they assume an unnamed second person has been saving for themselves. The poem’s use of “I” establishes it as a first-person account and grounds it in the speaker’s actions, having “eaten / the plums” (1-2). The stanza then adds information about the plums, stating that they were “in / the icebox” (3-4). The poem’s second stanza continues the ideas of stanza one, focusing on the same object (the plums) but introducing a second figure whom the poem addresses. Like the speaker this addressee...