By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Written in October 1961 as she was beginning to find her own distinctive poetic voice, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ is one of the most widely discussed and analysed of Sylvia Plath’s poems. This is perhaps inevitable, in a poem which is so loaded with symbols; our instinct as readers, and as literary critics, is to decode the symbol or discover what the poem really ‘means’.