"Forbidden Fruit": Aurelia Plath's Poems*

 

 

Aurelia Schober was 17 years old when her high-school yearbook, The Echo, 1923, published her poem "Forbidden Fruit." The Winthrop, Massachusetts High School yearbook, like many high-school and college yearbooks of the time, printed samples of students' creative writings. Aurelia's college yearbook in 1928 published another of her poems, unsigned (p. 196), but in the 1970s Aurelia Schober Plath identified it for Plath biographer Harriet Rosenstein:

 

A CHILD'S WISH

 

The sky is blue and the wind blows free,

Oh come for a run on the beach with me!

 

We will delve in the sand and race with the waves

We will jump on the rocks where the salt sea laves,

We will ponder the driftwood strewn up by the tide,

We will search for a cavern where mermaidens hide.

 

And then in a calm we might hear a roar

Of very great waves on a distant shore.

Far out on the point a light tow'r we see,

Oh won't you come for a run with me?

 

Emotionally and technically "A Child's Wish" is such a regression that if Aurelia wrote it after writing "Forbidden Fruit," and after reading contemporary poetry books that we know Aurelia owned and annotated, such as Sara Teasdale's Dark of the Moon (1926) and Edna St. Vincent Millay's The King's Henchman (1927), "A Child's Wish" might be a "decoy" or "dummy" poem. Remember, Aurelia in 1928 was not yet married, a mother, or a schoolteacher, so did not write this poem for her children.

 

A "decoy" poem is what a college student caught in and crushed by a fiery love affair with a man 22 years older writes to show her parents, who want her to be a secretary, that she is still pure and innocent. Aurelia was her college yearbook's editor that year. The yearbook's creative-writing pages printed 17 pieces, all unsigned; at the end are listed ten different authors, including Aurelia. What I call a "dummy" poem is a bloodless exercise on an unobjectionable topic, such as a child on the beach. Maybe a reader of "Forbidden Fruit" had hinted to Aurelia that young women should not write, for all the world to see, about succumbing to temptation, and suggested to her that poetry in general led into morally dubious territory.

Or else "A Child's Wish" was the best Aurelia could do.

 

Aurelia's annotations on her daughter Sylvia Plath's letters and papers show how habitually Aurelia expressed one thing while thinking another. Proof that she wasn't born that way is that Aurelia never hid her feelings well. What's building as I research Aurelia's life is a picture of young Aurelia as a leader, intrepid, adventurous, game; then backpedaling. Sylvia too played at feminine artifice, but became renowned for finally telling it like it was.

Aurelia also wrote a greeting-card-type poem for her daughter Sylvia's 13th birthday, rather cliche, nothing special. Yet it is fortunate for literature that Aurelia loved poetry and had practiced the craft, hands-on, and then guided and supported her gifted Sylvia, although Aurelia herself ultimately gave it up.

*Aurelia Plath did not compose the poem "Rebecca," about a little girl with a doll, Rebecca, who "caught a chill" and needed special care. The poem, credited to Eleanor Piatt, first appeared in St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, vol. 36, in 1909. Aurelia copied it into a letter she sent to Sylvia in 1938, specifying that it was a poem she had enjoyed as a child.