The Moon

The Moon and the Yew Tree – Sylvia Path – Comments

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The Moon and The Yew Tree
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.
Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963)

This poem was composed in October 1961 when SP was living at ‘Court Green’ cottage North Tawton, Devon. At that stage her marriage with Ted Hughes was still intact. The cottage was close to St Peter’s Church which was visible when she was writing. And at some stage she would have ventured inside.

A carefully designed poem of four seven-line stanzas with distinct sentence punctuation.

S1 … Clearly written at nighttime where SP invokes a ghostly graveyard presence. And there was a mist evident to add to such a scene. The moon has that association with the mind and lunacy. The griefs being the gravestones in rows. As if I was God – well, SP is not God and cannot perform miracles on the dead. The trees stand out black and the light from the moon blue. She cannot see the path through to the Church

S2 … This stanza has two distinct parts. SP personifies her emotional state on to the moon – white as a knuckle and terribly upset. I like the image of the moon dragging or sucking up the sea like a thief. It conjures up a rain squall coming off the sea. SP says this is where she lives, and she knows the sound the church bells make every Sunday morning.

Christianity and resurrection then come to mind in relation to the dead and the gravestones. But the bells only bong out their names – the names on the gravestones. SP is clearly dead to the thoughts of any resurrection to an afterlife.

S3 … The yew tree points up. Gothic shape implying dark and morbid.  It is worth considering the symbolic representation of the yew tree –

Christian stories of resurrection led the tree to become a symbol of eternal life. As the trunk of the tree begins to decay, a new tree can form. This represents the cycle of life that makes Yew trees a symbol of rebirth as well.

But there is no tenderness, sadly only a Mother Moon image associated with a wild nature represented by seeing bats and owls fly up unleashed against the ghostly blue light.

How SP would like it to be otherwise.

S4 … It looks like clouds are causing the firmaments to be seen and not seen. The inside of the church is the scene of fixed figures and maybe the stained-glass windows can record saints seen above the pews. Again, a cold dead image of being stiff with holiness as in no resurrection. The moon is wild and full of life unknowing of such human quandaries concerning death. The message of the Yew tree is black. SP is displaying her view on religion and the resurrection. The poem ends with a dark depressive feeling.

See this link for a video of Court Green and the Church – Sylvia Plath Video & Picture Post: Court Green (sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.com) … and courtesy of this Site –

Court Green – from the Church of St Peter’s
at North Tawton, Devon

Shelley and the Moon

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The moon is a feature in some of Shelley’s work … including his masterpiece ‘Prometheus Unbound’ … whether or not you know anything about Shelley and his poetry have a look at the imagery conjured by this beautiful little poem (these are two fragments that were put together after his death) …

THE MOON

I.

And, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east
A white and shapeless mass.

II.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

… and here are some ‘transformation lines’ from Prometheus Unbound (1 see below) showing a thankful Moon in discussion with Earth …

THE EARTH
…

“How art thou sunk, withdrawn, cover’d drunk up
By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup
Drained by a Desart-troop – a little drop for all;
And from beneath, around, within, above,
Filling thy void annihilation, Love
Bursts in like light on caves cloven by the thunderball”

THE MOON

The snow upon my lifeless mountains
Is loosened into living fountains,
My solid Oceans flow and sing and shine
A spirit from my heart bursts forth,
It clothes with unexpected birth
My cold bare bosom: Oh! it must be thine
On mine, on mine!

Gazing on thee, I feel, I know,
Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow
And living shapes upon my bosom move:
Music is in the sea and air,
Winged clouds soar here and there,
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:
“Tis Love, all Love!

Prometheus Unbound Act 4 (lines 350-369)

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Footnote …

1 Prometheus Unbound is based on the work of Aeschylus which dramatizes the sufferings of Prometheus, unrepentant champion of humanity, who, because he had stolen fire from Heaven, was condemned by Zeus to be chained to Mount Caucasus and to be tortured by a vulture feeding on his liver. Shelley continued the story but transformed it into a symbolic drama about the origin of evil and of overcoming it.

(Aeschylus (525-455BC) was an ancient Greek playwright … the father of tragedy … earliest of the three Greek playwrights Sophocles, Euripides.)

For those interested in Shelley’s background this is a link to an excellent bio –

… and some relevant text from the above site …

During this 1818-1819 period Shelley wrote what many consider to be his masterpiece, Prometheus Unbound (1820), subtitled A Lyrical Drama, perhaps to suggest a hybrid genre in the way Wordsworth and Coleridge had signalled their pioneering efforts by titling their first volume of poetry Lyrical Ballads (1798). Shelley had been developing the symbolism, imagery, and ideas for the poem for several years. For example, he states in the preface that “the imagery which I have employed will be found … to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind,” a technique he had already used in Mont Blanc. Shelley had had a longstanding interest in and familiarity with Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, even translating it for Byron, but he could not accept the idea that Aeschylus had bound the champion of mankind for eternity, or even worse, that Prometheus would have been reconciled with Jupiter in Aeschylus’s lost drama, the sequel to Prometheus Bound. As Shelley avers in the preface, “I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind.” The choice of Prometheus as his hero is not surprising, given this mythological character’s association with rebellion and isolation from his act of giving fire to man against the gods’ wishes and his reputation as a “fore-thinker” or prophet. For Shelley he came to symbolize the mind or soul of man in its highest potential.

Shelley was willing to challenge ‘the establishment’, the conventions of his day, and of more importance ‘The Gods’ (God) to establish his own internal truth.