Summary
“The Moon and the Yew Tree” consists of four stanzas, each seven lines long. It features an unnamed first-person speaker who observes and mediates on her psychological relationship to her surroundings, including a full moon and a yew tree in a church graveyard.
Stanza 1 begins in the speaker’s mental landscape, an eerie and hostile environment occupied by a mysterious blue light and black trees. The grass in this place clings to the speaker’s feet, resembling the way religious worshippers might cling to their god with their grief and adoration. This place also appears to be haunted by fumes and mists that remind one of ghosts. It is then revealed that the speaker is in a graveyard next to her house. Despite being close to home, the speaker comments that she does not know where to go.
In Stanza 2, the speaker’s gaze shifts to the full moon, which is white and, unlike an inanimate object (such as a door), resembles a human face. The moon is also unlike a door, which can open and close, because it seems utterly shut off and distant—it resembles an upset and terrified face. The moon’s gravitational pull, which produces waves, resembles the act of dragging an object, or the sinister attempt to hide one’s dark sin. The quietness of the moon makes it seem like a silent mouth: round, gaping in despair, yet speechless. The speaker then reminds the reader that this is where she lives, and also reveals that this graveyard is located within a churchyard. Sunday service is held at the church, where eight bells ring to commemorate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The bells also seem to sound out their own names at the end of service.
Stanza 3 reveals that there is also a yew tree in this yard. It points upward to the moon, like the pointing structure of a building designed in the Gothic style. The speaker, likewise, looks to the moon, which she refers to as her mother. Yet the moon is nothing like an ideal mother figure or the sweet Virgin Mary; it is hostile, surrounded by threatening nocturnal creatures (such as bats and owls), and unable to offer the tenderness that the speaker craves. The speaker still wishes that the face of Mary, softened in the candlelight, would look back at her affectionately.
The speaker begins Stanza 4 by confessing that she has traveled a long journey of psychological and spiritual decline. Above her, blue clouds are covering the stars. In the church, images of saints seem like floating ghosts. They appear to be holy, but the moon dismisses this holiness. It resembles a bald head, and seems wild rather than reliable and welcoming. The poem closes with the statement that the yew tree, similarly, has nothing to offer but its black color and speechlessness.
Analysis
“The Moon and the Yew Tree” is a meditation on death, love, faith, and belonging, from the perspective of a speaker who finds herself in various liminal spaces: between the moonlit sky and the dark graveyard, between the hostile mother and the inaccessible father, between home and the otherworld. Plath uses imagery, allusions, and various formal devices to amplify the speaker’s sense of displacement in these contradictory spaces.
In Stanza 1, Plath produces confusion, both spatial and musical. The setting of the poem is initially unclear (with the ambiguous “This” in Line 1), and the opening lines never clarify whether the “cold and planetary” blue light (Line 1) and the “trees of the mind” (Line 2) are real, or mere figments of the imagination. The reader’s sense of space becomes subjective and unstable—so does the rhythm of the poem, as it hints at pentameter (“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary”) but never strictly adheres to it. (Line 3 has as many as six, maybe seven stresses.) Rhymes, too, enter and exit Stanza 1 irregularly: “blue” (Line 2) rhymes with “to” (Line 7), and “planetary” (Line 1) ends with the same vowel as “humility” (Line 4), but these patterns are never revisited. Just as the form of this poem lies somewhere between unrestricted free verse and rhymed pentameter, the speaker “simply cannot see where there is to get to” (Line 7), finding herself by the “row of headstones” (Line 6) between her house and the graveyard, between life and death. Though accompanied by “spiritous mists” (Line 5) and personified grasses that approach her “as if [she] were God” (Line 3), the speaker is utterly lost and lonely.
“The moon is no door,” begins Stanza 2, sharply. The word stanza means “room” in Italian, and connecting doorways are absent from Plath’s rooms. The speaker similarly has trouble building an emotional connection to the moon: it is too independent (“a face in its own right,” Line 8), “terribly upset” (Line 9), and deeply involved in the “dark crime” of its capricious gravitational pull (Line 10). Just as the poem formally oscillates between free verse and traditional rhyme and meter, the moon transgresses various categories of being—is it a human face, a human “knuckle” (Line 9), a human mouth (“O-gape,” Line 11), or a whole human being dragging the sea? The church, too, straddles faith and blasphemy. Its personified bells announce the beginning and end of Sunday worship, but also “startle the sky” (Line 12), disrupting divine order. They “affirm[] the Resurrection” (Line 13), then turn to the egotistical recitation of “their names” (Line 14). The speaker’s passing remark in Line 11—“I live here”—jammed between descriptions of the moon and descriptions of the bells, likewise seems displaced and ambivalent.
Stanza 3 abruptly cuts to the yew tree. Notice, here and in other moments of the poem, how Plath writes frequently in full stops (“The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape,” Line 15) and very rarely in enjambments that might gel her lines together. Erecting this sudden yew tree in the middle of the poem, Plath further amplifies the image of discord and detachment. Readings of this poem that equate this phallic yew to Plath’s father, Otto Plath (who was German, like the “Gothic” people, and dead, like those buried in this graveyard) associate the yew and moon (the speaker’s “mother,” Line 17) with paternity and maternity respectively. The hostile moon-mother is contrasted with the sweet Virgin “Mary” (Line 17) and her metonymic “blue garments” (Line 18). Unlike Mary, the idealized mother figure, the moon has an ominous night sky for its blue drapery and “small bats and owls” (Line 18) that resemble the winged Satan in his many Biblical and literary representations. The speaker would prefer the reciprocal, warm gaze of an artificial, humanoid “effigy” (Line 20) representing Mary (while this artificiality perhaps resembles the ritualistic performance of the bells). While the speaker wishes to believe in comfort and affection, the consonance and sibilance across Lines 18–21 (“owls,” “tenderness,” “candles,” “eyes”) similarly add an illusion of togetherness.
Stanza 4 begins with a confession, evoking both Plath’s fame as a confessional poet and the religious confessions that might take place in a church. “I have fallen a long way” (Line 22) lays bare the speaker’s emotional and spiritual deterioration. The verb “fall” also resonates with the Biblical downfall of humankind from divine glory into sin. Likewise, the images of the final stanza are morbid, merging images of holiness and life with those of sacrilege and death: while the trees are dark, stagnant, and possibly dead, “[c]louds are flowering” (Line 22) in the night sky; the saints become ghosts, “[f]loating [...] over cold pews” (Line 25) rather than keeping their place in the church. The color blue, a loosely defined motif in this poem, bleeds into all of these images and disrupts their sacred boundaries. The “bald and wild” (Line 27) moon will never perform the traditional femininity of a long-haired Virgin Mary, and the yew tree delivers a “message” (Line 28) of death and rejection rather than the Christian gospel of paternal sacrifice, forgiveness, and resurrection. Repeating “blackness” and adding “silence” (Line 28), Plath also achieves the visual displacement of the final line. Like the elongated conclusion that looks out of place, the speaker (who disappears after “I have fallen a long way”) leaves the poem without having found a home, parent, or self.
