“The Moon and the Yew Tree” appears in Ariel (1965), Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection of poetry and one of her most widely read works. The moon is a motif that appears in several Ariel poems; two that would be helpful to read alongside “The Moon and the Yew Tree” are “The Munich Mannequins” and “The Rival.”
“The Munich Mannequins,” like “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” is a poem that explores images of maternity, coldness, and death. The moon appears across Lines 4–5: “The tree of life and the tree of life // Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.” Here, the moon symbolizes the egg cell released by either of the ovaries (“The tree of life and the tree of life”) during menstruation, as well as the lunar cycle of periods. “The Munich Mannequins” portrays menstruation as an image of failed maternity and infertility (“to no purpose”), echoing the anti-motherhood image of the moon in “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” Notice also the tree-moon pairing, as well as the active verb “unloose” that appears in both poems, suggesting secretion, fluidity, and birth (or abortiveness).
“The Rival” opens with the line “If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.” While the moon is feminized, the person compared to the moon is explicitly non-female, described in Line 9 as “[s]piteful as a woman, but not so nervous.” The moonlike figure in this poem is in many ways evocative of Plath’s poet husband Ted Hughes, his artistic rivalry with Plath, his intervention in her work (e.g., “your first gift is making stone out of everything,” Line 6), and his widely known dissatisfaction with their marriage (e.g., “Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, / Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity”). Notably, the moon in “The Rival” is another “O-gape of complete despair”: “Her O-mouth grieves at the world” (Line 5), continuing the symbolic associations across the moon, the mouth, and the ineffability of feminine grief in Plath’s poetry.
