The Moon and the Yew Tree

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” is a poem by Sylvia Plath, dated 22 October, 1961, and first appearing in the collection Ariel published by Faber and Faber in 1965, and by Harper & Row in 1966.

[1] Plath composed “The Moon and the Yew Tree” while living with fellow poet and spouse Ted Hughes at his family’s estate in Devon, England.

The poem was conceived as an “exercise” in which Hughes challenged Plath to respond in verse to the full moon setting over a yew tree in a churchyard visible from her bedroom window.

[2] Caroline King Barnard praises the “powerful subtlety of ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree.’”[3] “The Moon and the Yew Tree” is not a genuine “landscape poem” where the natural setting is identifiable.

And that yew tree began, with astounding egotism, to manage and order the whole affair…It stood squarely in the middle of the poem, manipulating its dark shades, the voices in the churchyard, the clouds, the birds, the tender melancholy with which I contemplated it - everything!