The Moon and the Yew Tree Summary

On the night of a full moon, the first-person speaker of "The Moon and the Yew Tree" is in a church graveyard next to her house. Throughout the poem, she feels lost and abandoned, despite being very close to home. The atmosphere in the graveyard (or rather the speaker’s mental image of it) is ominous: there are black trees, an enigmatic blue light, blades of grass that stick to the speaker’s feet like religious worshippers, and mists that resemble paranormal spirits. The moon is white, resembling both a pale, visibly upset, and fearful human face, and a silent, gaping, despairing mouth. With its gravity, the moon pulls the sea as if it were a dark crime. The church holds religious service on Sundays (ringing its bells according to its ritual procedures). The yew tree in its yard, resembling a Gothic building, points toward the moon, but the moon does not reciprocate. The speaker states that the moon is her mother, and that the moon is not welcoming and affectionate like the Virgin Mary. The speaker wishes she could believe in, and receive, Mary’s loving attention. The gloomy night goes on, and while clouds cover the stars and the hanging portraits of saints in the church turn blue in the moonlight, the moon attends to none of these images. The yew tree is similarly unresponsive, simply black and silent.