NAME – DIVYA MOHATA

ROLL NUMBER – 0058

“I see myself as a shadow…
I feel a lack.” – The Secretary from Sylvia Plath’s BBC Radio play, ‘Three Women’.
‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ was published posthumously in Sylvia Plath’s collection called ‘Ariel’ (1962).
The setting of the poem is North Tawton, a small town in Exeter in the South-West of England, where Plath
had lived in the early 1960s. The theme of the poem revolves around her bleakness which stems from the
untimely death of her father and strained relations with her mother. Her husband, Ted Hughes, writes-
“Opposite the front of our house stands a church. Early morning in the dark I saw the full moon setting on a
large yew tree that grows in the church yard, and I suggested she make a poem of it. By midday she had
written it. It depressed me greatly…she insisted that it was an exercise on the theme of her thought.”
In the poem, the speaker inhabits the Wallace Stevensian ‘light of the mind’ which shows her ‘personal
ghosts’ and causes the spectre of the self to surface. Plath can locate for herself neither a physical nor a
psychological direction. She seems homeless at this juncture, seeing off only ‘the light of the mind’ which is
“cold” in the sense of its emotional climate and its sense of being beyond personal proximity and hence,
detached.
It is clear that the moon in the poem is symbolic of Plath’s mother, Aurelia. The word ‘planetary’ creates a
mood of feeling like an erratic wanderer as a contrast to the more rational sun which is a patriarchal figure.
We find Plath travelling to the tree which the sun has nurtured. As the literary daughter of W.B.Yeats, Plath
works out her personal mythology of the sun and the moon - the primary and the antithetical. The ‘grasses
murmuring their humility’ is the masochistic state of her mind.
The setting of the poem is a graveyard and the general mood is of loss, loneliness and dejection. In order to
reach her “house”, she must cross the headstones. Hence, she must travel beyond death to reach her
home and these confessional statements anticipate her eventual suicide. In her journal, Plath wrote, “Why
can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits me and is most becoming.”
The mother is not an anchor for Plath; she provides no relief from the demons that persistently haunt her
consciousness. The mother is accused of narcissism as she is occupied with herself and in intense
consideration of her role as a mother. She fails to relate to her daughter as an individual and the moon is
therefore seen as “white”. The moon causes the tides but since her mother is sinister, Plath feels dragged
by her like a corpse. The gloomy simile or conceit intensifies her complaint. The moon is a satellite body
that has killed the sea and is dragging its corpse. Her mother is compelled to accept Plath of whom she
feels ashamed.
The ‘O-gape’ points to the emptiness of the relationship between Plath and her mother. If ‘O’ be the
womb, then Plath is the futility of root. The space that Plath physically inhabits is severely detached from
her mental site and, therefore, we find her in a state of dejection and insecurities. There is a sense of
resignation and a despairing acceptance in the remark- ‘I live here.’ Such intensity of burden cannot be
borne for long. In her poem, ‘Apprehensions’, Plath asks – “Is there no way out of the mind.”
The church bells signify a muted, futile prayer and communicate to her the facility of death and a
consolation of insufficiency. The religion she belongs to cannot accommodate her so she must compose
the religion of ‘Supreme Fiction’ (Wallace Stevens) where the poet seeks liberty in literature and creates a
collective spirituality for all.
The yew tree represents Plath’s father who died when she was young. In Greek and Celtic mythology, the
yew tree has associations with death. Plath is searching for answers from her father and the yew tree
directs her towards her mother and so, Plath feels betrayed. The yew tree is the symbol of the phallic
which confirms Plath’s Elektra Complex.
The bats and owls are nocturnal creatures which are unleashed from her mother’s attitude towards her. It
is a clear gesture of rejecting her biological, earthly mother, Aurelia. Plath is casting a longing glance at
anthropocentric Christianity (Mother Mary) and wistfully says – “How I would like to believe in
tenderness.” Contrasting with the mild eyes of Mother Mary would be the stern eyes of her mother. The
effigy of Mother Mary holding baby Jesus makes Plath seek a personal Mary. 
The fourth stanza depicts Plath as a fallen angel who has dropped to the depths of her personal despair.
The very next line has the word 'clouds' creating an upward thrust only to denote that the 'blue and
mystical' is the condition that Plath has fallen from. This is the world of the nightingale and “now more
than ever seems it rich to die” (‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Keats).
The use of the words ‘stiff’ and ‘cold’ relate to the poet’s own state of stale sense of religion as rescue. The
ghastly deathliness of the saints establishes the impression of Rigor Mortis- the uncanny death and decay
of ‘holiness’. Plath associates the moon with her mother who is unable to see life from her perspective.
She is, perhaps, as ‘stiff’ as the saints. Such deep disillusionment about a relationship is born from an
equally intense desire to anchor in that relationship. Her mother is like the cold Diana, the ancient Roman
deity, the Goddess of the Moon and the Protectress of Women. She is the nocturnal goddess – luminous,
but cold and featureless. Plath, here, finds herself to be the untutored Phoenix.
Plath turns to her father but a deathly desolation encounters her desire for assurance. The message from
the yew tree draws attention to the impersonal moon. It is rather a communication that states the collapse
of it. Plath’s poem is a comment on the degeneration of the personal parental relationship and the silence
is not only of Plath’s own father but there is a collapse of communication and care from the Father in
Heaven. For Plath, her inner demons – the bipolar disorder – find expression in her personal poems.
Eventually, however, her deep depression makes her burn her thoughts in an oven.