‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (October 1961) by Sylvia Plath

Sometimes you are suddenly slain by a line and you feel your heart nearly stop. Some days a line comes along at just the right moment and pulls so hard you can barely breath. Poetry’s blade is sometimes soft and gentle, sometimes sharp and unrelenting. This emotional outburst of a line comes towards the end of Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree,’ a poem which dramatises a carefully released, carefully pacedcry for existential hope. Plath’s poem is full of declarations, for she is a poet who writes most confidently in the declarative mode. If you read the poem out loud — as you must — with its painful line stops and pauses, you enter into a jumpy form of liturgy. Or perhaps it is the mind, once again, speaking to itself. Plath’s speaker is looking for something to believe in. ‘The moon is my mother’, she declares a few lines before. ‘But she is not sweet like Mary.’ This Mary is not tender. She maybe dressed in blue and surrounded by candlelight, but she does not bring the peace and beneficience this speaker craves.

Tenderness is a difficult word to explain; you have to go looking for the person first. Tender is related to youth, to young unpricked, soft and fleshy skin. A baby’s skin is tender; so is that of a young chicken. Tender skin requires tenderness, gentle affection, softness. Plath’s speaker is in search of gentle eyes: the eyes of the candle looking down upon her from her high altar; eyes she hopes will offer forgiveness and understanding. She wishes to be ‘gentled’ by candles. To be less fierce. And which one of us with large hearts and extravagant tempers doesn’t wish for that? To be gentled by a soft flame.

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 at 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 be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over 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.