This Is Just To Say
-- Speaker (Title)

Importance: This quote is the poem’s title. While not technically a line of the poem, it outlines the speaker’s motivations for writing it and is significant as the first suggestion of the speaker’s tonal casualness. The title evokes the the paradoxical investment and nonchalance that will follow in the rest of the poem.

I have eaten / the plums
-- Speaker (Lines 1 – 2)

Importance: These lines open the poem and are some of the most well-known in twentieth-century poetry. They introduce the central image of the poem, the plums, and establish the speaker’s relationship to them.

that were in / the icebox
-- Speaker (Lines 3 – 4)

Importance: These lines, which refer to the plums from line two, deliver the first of several plum descriptions. They also provide the poem’s clearest setting clue: “icebox” dates the poem to the early twentieth century (likely William Carlos Williams’s present) and suggests the actions recounted have...