The Moon And The Yew Tree

Hey world.
So, this week to celebrate the one year anniversary of Haiku Hopscotch (!), I have decided to ponder and analyse 'The Moon and The Yew Tree' by Sylvia Plath.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
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. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
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.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
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.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

When I first read this I was struck by the gloom that radiates from this poem, and the ominous style emphasises the dark content. Overall, this isn't a happy poem. But then again, neither was Sylvia Plaith. She suffered from depression from an early age, and her marriage only made this worse, leading her to commit suicide on February 11th, 1963.

This poem really sort of illustrates what was going on inside her head. The first line of the poem demonstrates that she thought that what went on in her head was intangible to the outside world: 'This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.' It expresses isolation and seclusion. Her far away-ness. The detachment that made her such an uncommon observer was also the source of a heartbreaking loneliness.

Perhaps this is borne out of a sense of spiritual abandonment. Throughout this poem there is a holy undercurrent. Plath was not strictly religious but her father was, and the references to religion are numerous throughout the poem:

'The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God'.

This line I find quite interesting, as when I first read it I was confused why she had paired together grass with god. Then, as I kept reading I figured out that the grass might represent the dead people in the ground, as later on she mentions tombstones. Plus, upon further research I discovered that Yew trees typically grow in graveyards or by churches. So, the grass unloading their grief might really mean that the dead in the ground are grieving their lives, and how she lives and they don't. Kind of creepy right?
In fact, this whole poem kind of creeps me out. It creates a macabre and ghostly atmosphere, that leaves the reader feeling haunted.

I wonder if she wrote this poem at a time that she was feeling particularly haunted by her depression.

The moon is also a massive piece of symbolism. It it both a hopeful component, a single light in a dark poem, and a sinister element:

'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. I live here.'
White as a knuckle implies stress, or tension as your knuckles only turn white when you are gripping something tightly. Plath makes no efforts to make the moon seem happy or reassuring in the slightest bit. The imagery she uses in the line 'it drags the sea after it like a dark crime' really illustrates a negative image. 'O-gape of complete dispair.'

Again, here I feel she is hinting and referencing to her depression, something that consumes her day and night, with the only positive element of producing excellent poetry.

The Yew Tree too holds some symbolism. It is not the most attractive tree and as I said before, it is mainly found in graveyards. With its little red berries (that are poisonous), this gives another undercurrent of death and macabre.

Ok, so, on that happy note, thanks to everybody out there, I am now up to 101 views!

Dont worry, Christmas isn't that far away. Maybe next time I'll do a bit more festive poem. Ha. Or not.

I'll finish with possibly the one and only positive quote ever uttered by Sylvia Plath:

'The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.'

Believe in yourself, world.

-A. Heezen🐝