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".^[17]

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]

Song Lyric Variations

In late November of 2017, a popular trend emerged on Twitter in which users remixed the words of the poem so that they'd read as the lyrics to popular songs. On November 27th, Twitter user @merrittk^[11] tweeted a parody of the poem set to Weezer's "Say It Ain't So," gaining over 740 retweets and 3,900 likes (shown below).

This inspired others to create interpretations of the poem set to various popular songs. One of the most popular tweets, posted by @thwphipps^[12] set the poem to Lou Bega's "Mambo No. 5", gaining over 3,500 retweets and 13,000 likes (shown below, left). Twitter user @Crillfactor^[13] set the poem to "All Star", gaining over over 360 retweets and 1,500 likes (shown below, right).

The spread of the jokes were covered by Twitter Moments^[14] and Daily Dot.^[15] An explainer for the meme as well as its earlier parodies was posted by Quora.^[16]

Various Examples

Various Examples

Search Interest

Note: this refers to the poem as a whole, not just parodies of it.

External References