Moon & Yews

Of course, there is Plath's marvelous poem,

The Moon And The Yew Tree

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 at my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy spiritious 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 be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over 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.

I love Plath's dark poem. Though this is not how I perceive the moon, I can empathise with some of the emotions and imagery, and I have often felt that the 'light of the mind' is 'cold and planetary.'

For me the moon is largely what Auden called it, in his poem 'Moon Landing':

'Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens
as She ebbs and fulls, a Presence to glop at...'

Yes, 'a presence to glop at.' But it is other things too: a big shiny tack fixing the night's silence, a kind of tuning fork, ash-light, bullseye for lovers, drop of buttermilk, something for clouds to polish, washed-out coin whose features are eldritch-clear...

The moon in the above picture, one day past full, gave the local park a focus, a magnetic draw. It isn't really a photographer's moon so much as an oil-painter's, but it was still irresistible.