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“The Moon and the Yew Tree” Introduction
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"The Moon and the Yew Tree" was written by the American poet Sylvia Plath in October 1961. Like much of Plath's writing, this is a deeply ambiguous poem that has been interpreted in a number of different ways. Most clearly, it expresses a disillusionment with religion (and more specifically the Catholic church), a deep and overwhelming sense of despair, and an ambivalent attitude towards the traditional expectations of motherhood and femininity. Many readings of the poem also draw on Plath's own difficult relationship with her parents, treating the moon and the yew tree as direct symbols of Aurelia and Otto Plath. That said, the poem benefits from not being confined to a purely autobiographical interpretation.
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“The Moon and the Yew Tree” Summary
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This is the light inside my head. It is not a warm light, and it comes from the planet itself. The trees I see inside my mind are black and the light inside my mind is blue in color. When I walk across the lawn my feet bend the blades of grass, which makes it seem like they're praying to me. It's like I'm God and they're laying their sorrows at my feet, poking at my ankles and quietly affirming their lowliness. Foggy, ghostly vapors fill up this place, which is cut off from my house by a row of graves. I just cannot see anything beyond this.
The moon isn't some kind of opening that you can walk through. Its face is as pale as a clenched hand and obviously distressed. Its gravity creates the tides, the water trailing after it like the memory of some horrible crime. The moon doesn't speak, but its mouth is open wide in an image of total despair. This is where I live. Two times every Sunday, church bells ring out and abruptly shatter the silence—they are like eight huge tongues declaring the Resurrection of Jesus. They solemnly sound out their own names.
The yew tree grows towards the sky, in a shape suggestive of Gothic architecture. My eyes follow where it seems to be pointing and arrive at the moon. The moon bore me, but my mother isn't kind and gentle like the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. Instead, the moon's blue clothes are filled with small bats and owls. I would very much like to believe in gentleness and love—I would very much like to believe in the statue of Mary, softened by candlelight, bending over and casting its gentle gaze on me specifically.
But I am too far gone. The clouds above are blocking out the stars. They are blue and inspire a sense of spiritual awe and mystery. The spirits inside the church are blue too. They hang above the hard, unwelcoming church benches as if they were already dead, their hands and faces rigid with belief. But the moon is blind to all of this. She is hairless and untamed. And the yew tree gives off only darkness—darkness and silence.
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“The Moon and the Yew Tree” Themes
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Religion, Nature, and Death
“The Moon and the Yew Tree” is an ambiguous poem open to many interpretations, but a clear sense of disillusionment with religion runs throughout. The speaker seems to be looking out on an eerie night landscape and searching for some kind of meaning or comfort, as is promised by the church. Yet where the speaker longs for some sense of reassurance or warmth, she only sees an existence governed by an indifferent natural world and the inevitability of death.
The speaker clearly feels alone and hopeless as she struggles to see beyond the immediacy of death, which surrounds her. Nature itself seems to be filled with references to death. The “griefs” of the grasses, the “spiritous mists,” and the “black trees” all present nature as far from comfortable or comforting to the speaker. Instead it seems lifeless, cold, and dark. Even more pressing is the “row of headstones” that blocks the speaker’s path back to her house. She “simply cannot see where there is to get to.” The speaker’s vision—her way forward—is blocked by death.
The speaker then mentions church bells and the Resurrection (when God raised Jesus from the dead), perhaps signifying the potential of religion to offer some solace in the face of all this death and grief. Yet that these church bells “startle the sky” suggests a sort of shocking violence to their ringing, which is further described as being done “soberly”—without great joy or vivacity. And though the speaker wants to believe in “tenderness” and the “mild eyes” of the Virgin Mary—which suggests that she wants to believe that religion can ease her suffering—the speaker also says that she “has fallen a long way.” This perhaps signifies how distant the speaker has grown from the church, and/or how she feels unworthy of such tenderness. In other words, she doesn't believe the church can help her.
Indeed, she then envisions that the saints in the church are “all blue.” The color blue (which has been associated with coldness throughout the poem, and which also is traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary) implies that these saints are not filled with passion and vigor but rather are lifeless, stern, and without warmth. The same can be said of the “cold” church pews. Both the saints and physical structure of the church are thus linked to the “light of the mind,” which is also “cold” and “blue.” While the imagery is again ambiguous, this implies that religion offers no balm for the speaker’s internal despair; instead, it is a continuation or reflection of it.
The speaker further describes the hands and faces of the saints as “stiff with holiness.” This perhaps suggests that the saints themselves have always been a sort of dead relic. It also might suggest the speaker’s belief that intense worship drains people of their warmth and vitality. Either way, the image indicates that she finds neither comfort nor meaning in religion.
Having not found comfort in religion (either because she is too “fallen” to be saved or because it offered a hollow promise of comfort in the first place), the poem ends with a return to nature and thoughts of death. The speaker turns away from the image of the saints in favor of the moon, who “sees nothing” of the saints’ devotion. In other words, the moon—part of the natural world—is indifferent to the lives of people; its cycles stop for no one. For the speaker, there is thus no comfort to be found anywhere. There is only nature and its brutal cycles; only the “blackness and silence” of the yew tree.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-28
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The Nature of Despair
The poem begins with a peek into the speaker’s internal world, which is cold and dark. Her descriptions of the natural world then seem to be an extension of her own mood, making it unclear where one ends and the other begins. The merging of these two worlds—internal and external—illustrates how despair and/or mental illness can shape and color people’s perception of the world around them.
The speaker of the poem is clearly suffering. She is alone, unable to access comfort from nature, religion, or her family. She describes “the trees of the mind” as black, and the “light of the mind” as “blue.” Trees are usually associated with life, and light with truth, warmth, and knowledge. In presenting her "mind" trees as black and the light as blue, the speaker reveals how her despair has seemingly recolored the world itself.
She goes on to describe a cemetery, in which “Fumy, spiritous mists” live. This seems to indicate that the speaker feels haunted by death. She finds no comfort in nature, which “unloads” its grief on her as if she were God. She identifies with God not because she feels powerful but because she feels utterly alone, as if there is no one for her to turn to for guidance or comfort. Additionally, she finds no comfort in the “cold pews” of the church, nor in the equally cold relationship she has with her mother, who “is not sweet.” Her mother is in fact "the moon"—"wild" and blind to the speaker’s suffering. Their relationship is one of distance.
The speaker continues to describe the landscape in ways that reveal her own suffering, so that the poem itself becomes a sort of map of her despair. The ambiguity of the speaker’s location—i.e., is she looking out on the cemetery from her home, imagining things? Or is she actually physically in the cemetery?—underlines her struggle. It seems she cannot differentiate between what is in her mind and what is in the real world.
This speaks to the fogginess of despair as well as her inability to break free from this cycle: her despair colors the world, and this dismal world then prompts her despair. For example, she personifies the moon, describing it as “terribly upset” and then saying that it is “quiet with the O-gape of complete despair.” She is projecting her own feelings onto the moon, but it feels as if it is the moon itself which prompts this feeling of hopelessness.
The speaker finally claims that the “message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.” This interpretation of the yew tree as a message which affirms her despair is a testament to how deeply her perceptions have colored the world around her. There is essentially no divide between internal and external at this point—the speaker is seeing her own mood reflected back to her. This underlines the cyclic nature of despair, a feedback loop that traps people in a state of hopelessness.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-3
- Lines 5-7
- Lines 8-11
- Lines 15-18
- Line 22
- Lines 27-28
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Motherhood and Femininity
The moon often represents femininity in literature, and the same is true in this poem. However, the moon of “The Moon and the Yew Tree” is not a traditional, nurturing femininity but rather one characterized by coldness and emotional distance. The speaker longs for a tender maternal presence, but at the same time she identifies with the cold and wild moon. The poem thus presents a complicated relationship to stereotypical expectations of femininity.
The speaker’s desire for a “mild” femininity is at odds with her experience of motherhood and/or being mothered. She imagines the statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus, as being “gentled by candles,” which suggests the speaker's own desire for warmth and sympathy. She “longs for tenderness,” perhaps from her mother, or perhaps feels she herself is lacking in tenderness.
But the speaker has no gentle "Mary." She says that her own mother is the moon, and that the moon “is no door.” This image seems to suggest the speaker doesn’t find motherhood inviting. She doesn’t see it as something she can pass through but instead as something characterized by pain and isolation.
The moon’s “blue garments,” meanwhile, allude to the blue robes artists have typically depicted the Virgin Mary wearing. This image of perfect motherhood, however, is subverted by the “small bats and owls” associated with the moon. This is a harsh, carnivorous femininity. It “drags the sea after it like a dark crime,” insinuating that it is not an innocent femininity but one that is capable of real harm.
Despite her longing for a mother like Mary, or perhaps for the ability to be more gentle and nurturing as a mother herself, the speaker also doesn’t seem to believe in that this ideal maternal figure actually exists. The moon may not be “sweet like Mary,” but Mary is, after all, only an “effigy.” She is a statue.
The speaker also insists that she has “fallen a long way,” perhaps indicating that she herself cannot live up to the standard of motherhood imposed on her (or which she imposes on herself). The speaker finally describes the moon as “bald and wild.” These are not descriptions of a tame, gentle femininity. Instead the speaker comes to associate motherhood with the natural world, which is perhaps a step towards accepting its complicated nature.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 8-11
- Lines 16-21
- Lines 22-23
- Line 27
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Moon and the Yew Tree”
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Lines 1-4
This is the ...
... of their humility.The poem opens with what is most likely an allusion to the Bible: "When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.'" (John 8:12) The speaker introduces the poem as a kind of counterpoint to "the light of life," instead saying that what is to follow is "the light of the mind."
She goes on to describe this light as "cold and planetary," and then paints a stark, icy scene: black trees, blue light, grief-stricken grasses. There is a shortness to her descriptions; the statements are not long and winding but terse, to-the-point. In fact, the sentences in this stanza never stretch across more than two lines, and that lack of elaboration, along with the descriptions of coldness and grief, help set the tone of the poem.
It becomes clear pretty quickly that the speaker has a fraught relationship with religion. Aside from the opening allusion, she also compares herself to God and the grasses to those who would worship and pray to God. More than anything, this image illustrates the speaker's feeling that there is no one above her that she can turn to—she likely compares herself to God not because she feels powerful or adored but because she feels utterly alone, as if there is nowhere she can unload her own griefs.
Lines 3-4 ("The grasses unload ... humility") contain a great deal of consonance that affects the tone of the passage. The repetition of /g/ sounds in particular with "grasses," "griefs," and "God" creates a kind of guttural, lump-stuck-in-throat kind of feeling which evokes the speaker's own grief.
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Lines 5-7
Fumy, spiritous mists ...
... to get to.
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Lines 8-11
The moon is ...
... I live here. -
Lines 12-14
Twice on Sunday, ...
... out their names. -
Lines 15-18
The yew tree ...
... bats and owls. -
Lines 19-21
How I would ...
... its mild eyes. -
Lines 22-26
I have fallen ...
... stiff with holiness. -
Lines 27-28
The moon sees ...
... — blackness and silence.
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“The Moon and the Yew Tree” Symbols
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Blue
The color blue does a lot of work in this poem. It is at once symbolic of coldness, darkness, mystery, and death.
In the second line the speaker describes the "light of the mind" as "blue." This paints a picture of someone who does not see the world in a warm light. Blue is often associated with sadness or melancholy, and this seems to be true for the speaker, who is surrounded by images of death and grief.
In the third stanza, the speaker claims the moon is her mother, and describes her "blue garments" which "unloose small bats and owls." The "blue garments" may be a reference to traditional depictions of the Virgin Mary, in which she is seen wearing blue robes. But unlike the Virgin Mary, the moon's robes unleash carnivorous, nocturnal animals. Bats themselves are often associated with death and darkness; owls too are associated with the night, the moon, mystery, magic, and ancient wisdom. Because of these associations, the moon is not just "not sweet like Mary"—the moon is unlike Mary in every possible way. The moon is part of the mystery of the natural world, and there is nothing terribly comforting about her. Her blueness is the opposite of the "effigy, gentled by candles."
In the final stanza, the speaker claims to "have fallen a long way" and then describes the clouds as "flowering / Blue and mystical over the face of the stars." Here, blue represents mystery. It obscures the stars, an image which speaks again to the speaker's inability to see "where there is to get to." Then the speaker pictures the saints as "all blue," "floating ... over the cold pews." This image is an eerie one, ghostly and suggestive of death, and underlines the speaker's belief that religion can offer no comfort.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 2: “blue”
- Line 18: “blue”
- Line 23: “Blue”
- Line 24: “blue”
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The Moon
The moon in this poem is a symbol both for nature and its brutal cycles, as well as for femininity and motherhood (which themselves are associated with nature's harshness in the poem).
The speaker's first mention of the moon is to claim that it "is no door." This speaks to the speaker's feeling that the moon can offer her no escape from her despair, that it only reflects back her feelings of hopelessness. It also paints the speaker's mother, or her relationship to motherhood, as something uninviting. Additionally, it implies that nature and motherhood are not metaphors but their own entities; the speaker wants to observe them for what they are, not for what she's been told to see in them by tradition and religion.
The moon then becomes a counterpoint for religion when the speaker contrasts the moon with the Virgin Mary. The moon is brutal: the image of her garments setting loose carnivorous animals brings to mind Artemis, the Greek goddess associated with the moon and hunting. The moon is representative not of a "sweet" femininity, the femininity of the church, but a wild, ancient, and powerful femininity.
However, the speaker is still ambivalent about her relationship to the moon. While there is something celebratory in her description of the moon as "bald and wild," there is something pained in her assertion that "The moon sees nothing of this"—this being the speaker's pain and disillusionment as much as anything else. The speaker both longs for and refuses the archetypes she's been given for femininity and motherhood. For this reason, the moon is a rich and complex symbol.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 8-11: “The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, / White as a knuckle and terribly upset. / It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet / With the O-gape of complete despair.”
- Lines 16-18: “The eyes lift after it and find the moon. / The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.”
- Line 27: “The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.”
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The Yew Tree
While the yew tree is only mentioned by name twice in the poem, its presence is strong throughout. The yew tree can be read as being symbolic of death.
Yews have been strongly associated with death for many hundreds—even thousands—of years. They are found throughout church cemeteries all across Europe, and are the longest-living tree in Europe. While many of them have been planted in church cemeteries over the past few hundred years, there are a handful that are much older than that, so old that they most likely predate the churches themselves.
This context helps establish the speaker's relationship to the yew tree. Not only is the yew symbolic of death, but it seems to imply that the natural cycle of life and death is more ancient, mysterious, and lasting than anything the church has to offer. The beliefs and rituals of human beings feels fleeting and insignificant in relation to the yew tree, which may live to be thousands of years old.
Early in the poem, the speaker describes "Fumy, spiritous mists" in the church graveyard. This, too, is a subtle reference to the yew tree, which is actually known to produce a kind of vapor which can cause hallucinations. This might suggest that death provokes people into believing things that aren't really true. Furthermore, the yew tree is highly toxic—another reason it has come to be associated with death. When the yew "points up" at the moon in the third stanza, the speaker's eyes find the moon. This seems to imply that in the face of death, the speaker seeks comfort—turning to the moon/her mother.
Finally, the yew tree is also often associated with eternity and everlasting life, due to its proximity to churches and also because of its longevity. The speaker, however, rejects the more religious associations of the tree, instead deciding that its "message" is of "blackness and silence." This speaks to her belief that there is no everlasting life, that there is nothing beyond death, that death itself comprises eternity.
It's worth noting that some critics have further associated the tree with Plath's father, Otto Plath. This is not abundantly clear in the poem itself, but another possible interpretation that would then link this male figure with darkness and death.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 5-6: “Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place / Separated from my house by a row of headstones.”
- Line 15: “The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.”
- Line 28: “And the message of the yew tree is blackness — blackness and silence.”
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Mary
In this poem, Mary, mother of Jesus and the most venerated of the saints, is symbolic of a traditional, religious ideal of motherhood. This ideal motherhood is "sweet," "gentle", "tender," "mild," and attentive. It is also impossible to live up to.
The speaker describes having "fallen a long way," a statement which seems to imply that she is unable to occupy the pedestal of this ideal motherhood. The "effigy" of Mary—that is, the statue of Mary to which the saints direct their prayers—subtly emphasizes the impossibility of such perfection. The statue is perfect because it isn't alive, isn't capable of making mistakes.
Ironically, even Mary, who is meant to symbolize this perfect mother, is inherently contradictory. According to the Bible, Mary conceived Jesus by way of the Holy Spirit, and therefore gave birth to a child while remaining a virgin. She is an impossible role model because no woman can occupy both roles at once.
Perhaps it is the impossibility of Mary which allows the speaker to turn away from this ideal motherhood and turn instead to the moon. Where Mary and the other saints are "stiff with holiness" (in other words—in their perfection they are lifeless), the moon is "bald and wild." While the speaker may not find nature any more comforting than religion, she can at least see herself reflected there.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 17: “Mary”
- Lines 19-21: “tenderness —— / The face of the effigy, gentled by candles, / Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.”
- Lines 24-26: “Inside the church, the saints will all be blue, / Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, / Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.”
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“The Moon and the Yew Tree” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Allusion
"The Moon and the Yew Tree" contains several allusions to the Christian religion, and more specifically to Catholicism. In fact the very first line may be a reference to a Bible verse: in John 8:12, Jesus says "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." The speaker contrasts the "light of life" with the "light of the mind," which is dark and lonely and without comfort.
In the following stanza, the speaker describes the church bells as "tongues affirming the Resurrection," which is an allusion to the Christian belief that three days after Jesus died, God brought him back to life. This seems to imply that the bells—ringing "Twice on Sunday"—are announcing that it is Easter Sunday, the day on which Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.
In the third stanza, there are several allusions to the Virgin Mary and Catholicism. According to the Christian religion, Mary was the mother of Jesus, and Catholics in particular venerate her as highest of the saints. "The effigy" refers to the statues of Mary to which Catholics may direct their prayers. The moon's "blue garments" are also an allusion to Mary, as she is traditionally depicted by artists as wearing blue robes.
Where allusion appears in the poem:- Line 1: “This is the light of the mind”
- Line 12: “Twice on Sunday, the bells”
- Line 13: “the Resurrection”
- Line 17: “Mary”
- Line 18: “blue garments”
- Line 20: “the effigy”
- Line 24: “Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,”
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Imagery
Unlock all 285 words of this analysis of Imagery in “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Simile
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Metaphor
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Sibilance
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Alliteration
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Repetition
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Personification
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Enjambment
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End-Stopped Line
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Caesura
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“The Moon and the Yew Tree” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Planetary
- Humility
- Fumy
- Spiritous
- Headstones
- O-gape
- The Resurrection
- Bong
- Yew tree
- Gothic
- Mary
- Effigy
- Mystical
Planetary-
(Location in poem: Line 1: “planetary.”)
Of, or relating to, planets (or more specifically, Earth). In this context, the word indicates that "the light of the mind" isn't coming from God or religion but from the natural world itself.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Moon and the Yew Tree”
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Form
"The Moon and the Yew Tree" is a free verse poem, so it does not adhere to any strict meter or rhyme scheme. The lines are relatively long, each line consisting of at least 10 syllables.
However, even though it is in free verse, there is a sense of restraint and order. It is broken into four septets (seven-line stanzas). The restraint largely comes from the syntax, which is mostly straightforward and clipped, as well as the shortness of sentences—the longest of which spans three lines, though most of them are shorter than that.
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Meter
"The Moon and the Yew Tree" is written in free verse, so it employs no set meter. This overall lack of meter gives the poem a more prosaic feel, contributing to the feeling of flatness which emphasizes the speaker's despair.
There are two metered moments in the poem, however, both of which happen in the final stanza as the speaker is describing the cold, stiff quality of the worshipping saints. Both of these moments employ iambic pentameter, meaning there are five poetic feet, each with a da DUM rhythm, in the line. Here is line 24:
Inside | the church, | the saints | will all | be blue,
And line 26:
Their hands | and fa- | ces stiff | with ho- | liness.
While the use of iambic pentameter gives the line a lilting, pleasing cadence, there is an irony to this beauty as it is describing something the speaker sees as empty and futile. It's as if she is saying sure, religious traditions are aesthetically pleasing, but in the end, they won't save you.
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Rhyme Scheme
While there is no set rhyme scheme at play in "The Moon and the Yew Tree," there are several moments of rhyme throughout the poem. Often these rhymes are not true rhymes but the effect of assonance and/or consonance at the end of a line or within a line, such as "upset"/"quiet" or "despair"/"here" in the second stanza. This allows for a subtle relationship between the words that sound similar, so that, for instance, when one reads "I live here" it is quite clear that "here" is referring to a state of "despair."
This happens again in lines 26 and 27 ("Their hands ... bald and wild.") with the assonance and consonance/sibilance between "holiness" and "this." Again, because of the resonance in sound, it is clear that "this" is referring to the "holiness" of the saints.
In the final stanza, the rhyme between "blue" and "pews" is noticeable, and reflects the kind of rigidity the speaker is describing. As meter is also employed in lines 24 ("Inside the ... blue,") and 26 ("Their hands ... holiness."), there is a noticeable musicality to the moments in which the speaker last describes the church. It gestures to the speaker's belief in the hypocrisy of religion, which is beautiful and comforting on the surface, yet ultimately meaningless.
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“The Moon and the Yew Tree” Speaker
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The speaker of "The Moon and the Yew Tree" is someone who is clearly suffering from a sense of despair and looking for some form of comfort. She "cannot see where there is to get to," an admission which reveals her lack of belief in the promises of religion, and also to her inability to see a way out of her suffering. She looks to nature for answers as well, but discovers that "the moon is no door"—in other words, that it will not provide relief for her suffering; it simply reflects her own despair.
The speaker is also someone who struggles with her relationship to motherhood. The poem seems to indicate that the speaker has a troubled relationship with her mother as well, who is likened to the moon: cold, distant, and indifferent. However, it also seems that the speaker herself identifies with the "bald and wild" moon; she "would like to believe in tenderness," but instead she believes in a "message" of "blackness and silence"—in other words, the voice of her despair.
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“The Moon and the Yew Tree” Setting
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The setting for "The Moon and the Yew Tree" is a church graveyard at night. The graveyard is separated from the speaker's house "by a row of headstones," and it is filled with "spiritous mists" and grieving grasses. The speaker goes back and forth between describing aspects of the church—its bells "on Sunday," the effigy of Mary, the saints in their "stiff" traditions—and the natural world, particularly the eponymous moon and yew tree.
There is no real divide between the speaker's state of mind and the external, physical world to which the speaker reacts. In other words, the speaker is in a state of despair, and this despair is only intensified by the fact that she is surrounded quite literally by death—the people buried beneath headstones. The juxtaposition between religion and the natural world occurs because that is what is immediately available to the speaker in her despair. She reaches for what she can see: the church, the graveyard, the moon, and the tree.
For that reason, even the most metaphorical statements can be understood in a very literal way as well. For instance, the speaker says she "cannot see where there is to get to." Metaphorically this refers to her inability to see beyond her suffering, and also to her disbelief in an afterlife. But it also just literally means that she is outside in the darkness, and can't see beyond a certain point.
Similarly, at the end of the poem, the "message of the yew tree," which is "blackness and silence," reads metaphorically: the blackness and silence is representative of her disbelief in an afterlife, and to her total succumbing to despair. But in a literal sense, she is only describing her environment: the night is dark and silent. And when read literally, the tone becomes a little ironic—the yew tree contains no "message" at all.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Moon and the Yew Tree”
Literary Context
"The Moon and the Yew Tree" was posthumously published on August 3, 1963 in The New Yorker, six months after Plath's death. It was part of her collection Ariel, which also went on to be published after her death.
As opposed to The Colossus, her first collection of poems, Ariel was highly personal, informed by Plath's own increasingly complicated relationship to marriage, motherhood, family, and gender expectations, as well her lifelong struggle with mental illness. The poems she wrote late in her career—the ones that would go on to comprise Ariel—were characterized by an insistence on puncturing the happy facade of domestic life. She was able to turn seemingly mundane everyday moments into highly charged, psychologically intense confrontations with her own darkest impulses.
While the cynicism and brutality of her poems have long divided critics, most at least agree that few other poets have revealed such depth of emotion or written with such imaginative force.
Historical Context
Plath wrote "The Moon and the Yew Tree" in October of 1961, in response to a writing exercise given to her by her husband, poet Ted Hughes (as noted in "The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath"). The yew tree in the poem was inspired by a real yew which existed in the churchyard west of the Plaths' house in Devon, England, which Plath could see from her bedroom window. The poem was written on the night of a full moon, in the early hours before dawn. Indeed, many of the poems from Ariel—especially the later ones, after Plath's separation from Ted Hughes—were written in the "blue" hours of the morning, before her two children, Frieda and Nicholas, awoke.
"The Moon and the Yew Tree" is often interpreted autobiographically; many interpretations treat the moon as directly symbolic of Plath's mother, Aurelia, and the yew tree as symbolic of her father, Otto. It is true that Plath had a complicated relationship with both of her parents which likely informed this poem as it did many others.
Plath was also a new mother at the time this poem was written; she had given birth to her daughter, Frieda, the previous year, and had suffered a miscarriage earlier in 1961. She had long been concerned about how having children would affect her creative life and her career, concerns that she explored extensively in her novel, The Bell Jar.
Plath herself spoke about "The Moon and the Yew Tree" in an interview for BBC radio. She described her attempt to "put into a poem ... things, familiar, useful and worthy things," including "once ... a yew tree ... It stood squarely in the middle of my poem, manipulating its dark shades, the voices in the churchyard, the clouds, the birds, the tender melancholy with which I contemplated it—everything! I couldn't subdue it."
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More “The Moon and the Yew Tree” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poetry of Sylvia Plath — A short video introduction to Sylvia Plath's work by author John Green via CrashCourse.
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Poetry and Feminism — A map of resources for tracing the evolution of feminism through poetry.
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ASL Translation of "The Moon and the Yew Tree" — The poem translated into American Sign Language by Crom Saunders.
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Beneath the Yew Tree's Shade — A little background on the significance of yew trees in the form of an excerpt from a book by Thomas Lacquer.
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A Reading of the Poem — A reading of "The Moon and the Yew Tree" produced by the BBC, originally broadcast in September 1962 as part of their New Poetry series.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Sylvia Plath
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