Poems About Aurelia Plath

Perseus isn't finished with Medusa until he turns his mother's suitor into stone.

"Sappho" by Beth Hinchliffe. America magazine, 29 June 2023. This poem was a runner-up in the Jesuit magazine's annual poetry contest. Aurelia Plath's friend and neighbor, journalist and author of an unpublished Plath biography, Hinchliffe said this was the first poem she ever wrote.

"Cottage Street, 1953" by Richard Wilbur, first published in 1972, describes Aurelia and a very depressed Sylvia having tea at his mother-in-law Edna Ward's house on Cottage Street in Wellesley. Mrs. Ward was Aurelia's friend. Hear Wilbur read the poem (and defend it).

"Aurelia Plath Confesses" by Lisa Mullenneaux, published in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 93, No. 2, Summer 2019. Mullenneaux is a poet, scholar, translator, and professor of writing, best known for the essay "Can You Call Her Sister? Amelia Rosselli on Sylvia Plath."

"Medusa" by Sylvia Plath (1962).

Frieda Hughes wrote several poems about her grandmother Aurelia. You've probably read some. Here are quotations from four different poems:

1. "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who is the least dead / Of us all?// You loved me not, just saw / A copy of the face / You gave birth to."

2. "Come live with me!" it cried, / Nostrils spread above like nose wings / As if the face would take off from its neck-end / Like a ghastly bald crow."

3. "Chipping away at her / As if she were an egg, / to be broken and beaten / And turned into something else."

4.  "She is the gypsy / Whose young have rooted / In the very flesh of her scalp. // Her eyes are drill-holes where / Your senses spin, and you are stone / Even as you stand before her."

I think you get the gist.

Although Ted Hughes wrote at least one poem centered on Aurelia, Birthday Letters offers only glimpses. His poem "Night-Ride on Ariel" makes a typically chilling reference: "Mother / Making you dance with her magnetic eye / On your Daddy's coffin"