"The Moon and the Yew Tree" & "The Thought-Fox" Jacks

Sensory imagery

Nigel Wheale points out that spiritous strictly means volatile; strong fumes such as that of alcohol. This, too, is arguably religious in the sense of the wine used during Communion. 

Plath also uses the auditory imagery of church bells and the visual image of darkness which instead of a monotonous depiction of loneliness perhaps depicts more of an ominous sense of isolation. This is again done cyclically; the speaker is left in darkness still, which therefore may represent the feeling of being resolutely abandoned. 

Gothic/Romantic

The extended religious and mystic semantic fields present throughout the poem seem to overly lean into archetypes present within Gothic literature, by which Plath is often inspired. In Gothic literature, paranormality or supernaturality is often used as an emblem of something intangible; perhaps Plath therefore transforms the setting into a ‘mindscape’, which embodies deeper emotional turbulence. This may be analysed through the maternal and morbid depiction of the moon.

The yew tree also appears to be a messenger or mediator between the speaker and the moon; it points the speaker to look at the moon, but ultimately its message is ‘blackness and silence’. This again exemplifies a sense of abandonment. 

Colour symbolism

The repeated reference to the colour blue throughout the poem maintains the ‘planetary’ atmosphere however may also be supposed to represent the sensation of being cold, particularly evident through the allusion to the priests, which blue typically is used to replicate. This is also emotionally associated with grief/sadness.

Ariel (1965)

• Cyclical structure

• Eery sibilance

• Septets

• Antagonistic plant

• Darkness & mist creating derealisation and surreality

• Colour motif

• Gothic imagery — graveyard

• Absurdism

• Plath was known to be a fan of Robert Graves who stated in his work The White Goddess that the yew tree is ‘the death tree in all European countries’.

• Letters Home, published by Hughes and Plath’s mother in 1975, revealed intimate details regarding Plath’s tensions with her mother, and with marriage/ motherhood

• When Sylvia couldn’t sleep, Hughes gave her the prompt of writing about what she saw outside her window; St Peter’s Church, a graveyard, and a yew tree

“In many instances, it is nature who personifies [Plath].”

Sensory imagery

Hughes arguably uses the auditory symbol of the ticking clock and the visual symbol of the starless night sky as a manifestation of the state of being uninspired; this is presented cyclically both at the front and end of the poem and so it seems that the poem concludes on a negative note, despite the objective being reached. 

The sensory image of the smell of the fox is also used in the final stanza, which abruptly quickens the pace of the poem to a moment of climax in which the speaker is suddenly inspired, as presented by the intimacy of being close enough to the fox to smell it. Sibilance is also used to exemplify this idea. 

Romantic Belief System 

This poem seems to follow the Blakean Romantic belief in the agency of nature: the Romantics believed that inspiration was better found surrounded by nature, rather than forced e.g. in school. An example of this would be Blake’s The School Boy from his 1789 collection Songs of Experience.

Colour symbolism

In Stanza 5, the green colour symbolism perhaps a moment of clarity in which the speaker’s inspiration emerges. This is also presented within an asyndetic list which arguably represents a rapid onslaught of inspiration. 

In contrast, in Stanza 3 the syndetic list ‘two eyes serve a movement that now, and now, and now, and now, set neat prints into the snow’, which has a slower place which may represent gradual progress. Moreover, the dark footprints against a white background may be utilising colours as a metaphor that parallels the ink printed on the page at the end of the poem – therefore seemingly done by the fox.

Hawk in the Rain (1957)

• Cyclical structure

• Pacing

• Quatrains

• Figurehead of nature

• Eyes

• Romantic imagery/ideology

• Romanticism — “The solitary genius”, sublime in nature, strive for freedom, primacy of the imagination

• Hughes didn’t write anything for a year, before TTF

• A bloodied fox appeared to Hughes in a dream, places its paw on his paper and told him to stop ‘destroying us’; inspired Hughes to change his university course from English to Anthropology 

Hughes’ Thought-Fox is “representative of the poet’s hidden self, the self from which his poetry comes.”

“Hughes and Plath write from one shared mind.”

• Both project their inner world onto an outer world

• Both engage with the topic of creativity

• Both end on a dissatisfied note despite achieving their objective

• Nature is unresponsive to Plath but communicative with Hughes