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The line recasts temptation as the whole material world.

Calling earth itself the forbidden fruit removes any safe distance between innocence and desire. The phrasing makes existence feel already implicated, as if living here means having tasted what was barred.

Two-line epigram: 'The Forbidden Fruit Is This: / Very Earth.'

The poem refuses the whole Eden frame by relocating the prohibited thing to the ground already under our feet. Calling it 'very Earth' — not just earth — is the page's small intensifier; this isn't a symbol, it's the specific planet. The bareness of the form means the reader has to supply the apple image themselves, and then discard it.