Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems by Camille Paglia

Author:Camille Paglia
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Poetry
ISBN: 0375725393
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2005-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

This Is Just to Say

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

With its offhand title, “This Is Just to Say” pretends to be no more than a memo, jotted in haste on a scrap of paper. But it is a highly original love poem whose casualness is a deft tribute and token of intimacy and respect. The note has been left in a kitchen, female space usually ignored by major literature. The poet knows that he is an intruder, a vandal disrupting the orderly center of life. His palpable sense of trespass turns the kitchen into Eden and the pilfered plums into forbidden fruit.

In genre, the poem is a mock confession and appeal for absolution. By confiscating the plums, the poet has preempted tomorrow morning’s meal and sabotaged his wife’s good housekeeping. “Forgive me,” the poet pleads, as if his wife were not only Eve with her seductive apple but the garden’s angry deity to be propitiated (9). She commands this realm even in her absence. At one level, the succulent, fleshy fruit is a makeshift proxy for the opulent female form. The poet feels naughty and childlike yet also smugly triumphant, like a hero spiriting away a fabulous treasure (compare Jason and the Golden Fleece). But his trophy is merely a simple pleasure and summer staple, a sun-ripened, royal purple gift of nature.

The note was evidently written overnight, while the rest of the family was asleep. Perhaps Williams, a physician by profession, returned from a house call or was working late at his desk and went foraging for a snack. The chilled plums, with their burst of multiple sensations, bring true refreshment, bracing and restorative after mental tension and fatigue. Hence the poem offers homage to the provisioner of this happy oasis. Women have been honored in poetry as lovers and (from the Renaissance on) as faithful wives, but rarely have they appeared as homemakers, queens of their own domain. Williams asks for no wider world than this. The disdainful frigidity of the Petrarchan lady takes amusing new form: the omnipotent mistress now rules the icebox, which has supplanted the blazing hearth as the vital center of the modern kitchen. The poem’s narrow shape actually resembles an icebox, a two-tiered fortress (block ice above, perishables below) that was transformed during Williams’s lifetime into the streamlined electric refrigerator. Opening like a vault, the icebox is analogous to a book or poem, which stores up reshaped experience for future pleasure.

Despite its deceptive plainness, “This Is Just to Say” triggers deep associations in the reader by playing on mythic patterns of sin and desire; female secrecy and fertility; and male aggression and violation. The fragmentary, nondescript title—just a sentence sliver—is self-referential in the modernist way, yet the poem’s brimming emotion is too rich for irony. Paced by short, halting lines, the rhythms are bewitchingly slow, evoking the reassuring stability of domestic routine. The poem’s condensed time scheme is surprisingly complex. The first stanza takes us backward into the dark recesses of the icebox, where the plums nest like eggs.

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