MANUSCRIPT: Typescript poem, "Class Song 1950" for Wellesley High School.
An Early Manuscript
From Her Mother’s Collection
Plath, Sylvia. Typescript, “Class Song 1950.” Words by Sylvia Plath. Music by R. Blakesley.
Single leaf of unlined typing paper; single horizontal crease and three vertical creases, where folded. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
An early typescript poem—in the form of song lyrics—composed by Plath in 1950 for her high school graduation. Plath wrote “Wellesley High Graduation Song (1950) by Sylvia” on the verso, and on the recto the typed heading, “Class Song—1950,” is circled in pencil, and Plath’s mother Aurelia docketed the leaf at the top right in blue ink, “keep,” and in the left margin, “Love Poems.” The text reads in full,
In cap and gown we stand before you, senior comrades unified.
Here stands the Class of Nineteen Fifty, for the last time side by side.
No music and no words can tell the sorrow and the joy we feel
As to Wellesley High we bid farewell to seek what the future may reveal.
(Chorus)
The days we’ve spent together here, with the best friends we could name
Never more will reappear, never more will be the same.
But though fate leads us far apart, as the years go passing by
We will always cherish in our heart our mem’ries of Wellesley High, our mem’ries of Wellesley High!
The calendar of school events, for the winter, spring and fall
Is a lit of Memories we find delightful to recall.
Perhaps at other graduations, songs like this one have been sung,
But we like classes long ago are as hopeful and as young.
(Chorus)
Sylvia Plath, who married Ted Hughes (present Royal Poet Laureate of England), was born in 1932 and raised in the collegiate town of Wellesley, Massachusetts, a community that would, in her adulthood, inspire ambivalence as she struggled with depression. An ambitious and cerebral young woman, Plath attended Smith College, where she majored in literature and received recognition for early literary endeavors. It was during this time, in spite of her ebullience about being “a Smith girl,” that her display of intermittent depression turned pernicious. During the summer of her junior year, as her efforts to assuage her unhappiness by writing failed, Plath attempted suicide for the first time by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. In Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, Anne Stevenson relates:
With the pills and a glass of water, Sylvia crept down to the basement; she knew there was a narrow crawlspace under the porch. Stealthily she removed the firewood stacked at the mouth of the hole, hoisted herself into the womblike cave with the bottle and the water, carefully replaced the firewood, proceeded to swallow as many pills as she could.
The process of completing The Bell Jar was cathartic for Plath, whose ritual of daily writing was intense and dogmatic. She, however, did not live to observe the success her novel received; she committed suicide 32 days after publication.
Plath’s true artistic medium was poetry. In 1960, she published The Colossus and Other Poems—the only collection she saw through print. The book was originally published in England by Heinemann, and in 1962 Knopf published an American edition slightly modified upon the insistence of the demure poet Marianne Moore, who suggested omitting certain “less appropriate” poems, including “Poem for a Birthday.” Plath’s second collection, Ariel, was published posthumously in 1965, and to this day Plath scholars argue over the arrangement its poems: Plath’s initial ordering differs from the published English and American editions, which Hughes reordered after her death—a decision many Plath scholars regard as contrary to Plath’s vision of the book.
Although Plath’s contribution to poetry was brief, her work and legend has persisted in post-war and contemporary literature.
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