Displacement
“The Moon and the Yew Tree” explores displacement, insecurity, and anxiety. Sprinkled throughout descriptions of the ghostly, moonlit church graveyard are the speaker’s remarks about her loss of direction: “I simply cannot see where there is to get to,” she laments in Line 7; “I have fallen a long way,” she confesses again in Line 22. These comments seem incongruous with the speaker’s physical location, which turns out to be a graveyard “[s]eparated from [her] house by a row of headstones” (Line 6). If she “live[s] here” (Line 11), why might the speaker feel so lost?
Plath suggests, through this contradiction, that the mind can be displaced even when the body is at home. Insecure attachment to parental figures, for instance, may cause emotional disorientation—the speaker feels abandoned between the hostility of the moon and the unresponsiveness of the yew tree. Perhaps her domestic sphere feels equally unsafe, as a result of past trauma (“I have fallen a long way”) unmentioned in the poem. For these reasons, the speaker seems to exist in her own “cold and planetary” mind (Line 1) rather than in the graveyard, hovering in the limbo between the skies and the earth. Like the saints “[f]loating on their delicate feet over cold pews” (Line 25), the speaker is in an exiled, neglected, and physically and psychologically unanchored state.
Parenthood
The poem also considers, metaphorically, the complexity of familial attachment, especially that between parent and child. “The moon is [the speaker’s] mother” (Line 17), but fails to offer her the “tenderness” (Line 19) for which she yearns. The yew tree—reaching toward the moon, dismissed by it, and avoidant towards the speaker—is evocative of a father figure in an insecure relationship with both the mother and child. A psychoanalytical reading of this poem might also explore how the moon’s vaginal image (as a failed “door,” Line 8) and the yew’s phallic image (“points up,” Line 15) both complement and conflict with each other. This poem also presents ways in which parenthood might be used as a metaphor for other subjects as well, such as religion (e.g., the moon “is not sweet like Mary,” rejecting both maternity and religious sanctity) or spatiality (e.g., maternity and paternity become two divorced “place[s],” the sky and the graveyard). Some critics have also observed a correspondence between the maternal-paternal dynamic in this poem and the relationship between the poet’s parents (Aurelia Plath and Otto Plath).
Death
Death is never mentioned, but it is evoked symbolically throughout the poem. The yew tree is a symbol of death, and its final “message” of “blackness and silence” (Line 28) evokes not only death but the will of a dying person. The poem is set in a church graveyard, where “a row of headstones” (Line 6) seem to demarcate the border between life and the afterlife, and “[f]umy, spiritous mists” (Line 5) haunt the place. The “[f]loating” images of saints (Line 25), too, seem paranormal and ghostly, while also visibly “stiff” (Line 26) like corpses. The personified moon (or Mary) is imagined to be an inanimate “effigy” rather than that of a living, breathing person (Line 20). “Resurrection” (Line 13) from death is a notion to be ritualistically recited, rather than actively explored or actualized. Surrounded by these morbid images, the speaker occupies a liminal space between the living and the dead.
Religion
The poem questions both the authenticity of religious practices and the authority of religious figures. It opens and closes with demonstrations of piety that seem performative and masochistic: the grasses cling to the speaker’s feet “as if [she] were God,” “murmuring of their humility” (Lines 3–4); the saints painted on the church walls are “stiff with holiness” (Line 26). Sunday service in this church is a mere routine, lacking genuine faith and often secondary to the humanistic ego-worship of its congregation: the bells ring “[t]wice on Sunday,” ritualistically, and the way they “startle the sky” suggests rebellion rather than reverence (Line 12). The bells seem too familiar with the process, including what happens “[a]t the end”; they “soberly bong out their names,” reverting back to self-love (Line 14).
The worshipped also defy the conventions of institutionalized religion. The moon is associated with the image of “Mary” (Line 17), but inverts the qualities of the Catholic deity with its hostile nature (e.g., letting “unloose small bats and owls,” and lacking Mary’s “tenderness”; Lines 18–19). “How I would like to believe in tenderness” (Line 19), remarks the speaker, suggesting that her questioning of Christian faith is part of a broader sense of skepticism towards love, trust, and attachment.
