This Is Just To Say Parody

About

This Is Just to Say is the title of a poem by the early 20th Century American poet William Carlos Williams. Due to the poem’s original fame, rhythmic timbre, short length, and relatively common subject matter, it is frequently parodied online, where users substitute their own subjects into the poem’s text, often retaining the verse structure and the significant line breaks.

Origin

This Is Just To Say was first published by William Carlos Williams in 1934. It is considered a canonical work of Imagist poetry.^[1] The original text is as follows:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

According to New York Magazine,^[2] parodies of the poem date back to at least the 1960s, with Kenneth Koch’s “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams.”^[9] Koch would go on to advocate using “This is Just to Say” as a teaching tool in his 1970 book Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry^[10] where he offered the poem as a model that young poets could riff off of to improve their skills.

The first early evidence of parody being written online is an allusion to a thread that existed on the “Straight Dope” message board, but was deleted in 2002. ^[2]^[3]

Spread

The easily parodic nature of the poem has been noted frequently in popular culture. In 2008, the radio show This American Life included an explanation of the spoofable qualities of the poem (and several spoofs of their own) in the second act of an episode entitled “Mistakes Were Made”:

Spoofs of the poem have been featured on web sites such as The Millions, Jezebel, and Metacritic.^[4]^[5]^[6] Creating spoofs of the poem continues to be popular on Twitter, where the bot @JustToSayBot tweets a new version of the poem every hour.^[7] Many tweeted parodies of the poem have gone viral. Posting spoofs or parodies of the poem is also popular on Tumblr.^[8]