Poem Reviews: ‘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 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.


Comment:

The light should be synonymous of life, tenderness, such as the family warmth, but the nature makes us a cruel joke, the moon is cold, impressive looking at us, without saying anything, this attitude also makes everything dry like the yew tree.

Without the mind, we cannot be considered human beings, the mind is at the center of everything, we can reason, we can be empathetic, we can prove emotions and give emotions, but it can also be impassive and distant like the moon with always the same face. It's better to have a death mother rather than impassive to the life of her daughter.

The Gothic yew tree is slender upward, it seems that it want to touch the cold moon, to stimulate a reaction even a false smile, but she remain impassible, it is an illusion to humanise my mother.

My mother is also immune to the call of the lord, remaining a piece of ice, there is no way to change her, the only thing to do isto think about blackness and silence of her mind.