Nick and the Candlestick
Nick and the Candlestick - context Summary
Published in Ariel, 1965
Written for Ariel, this poem addresses an unborn child with tense, claustrophobic imagery of a cave-womb and a small sustaining light. Plath mixes violent, religious, and domestic images—ice, knives, communion, Victoriana—to convey fear, bodily pain, and fierce protectiveness. The speaker alternates dread and tenderness, imagining the child as both fragile and central. Biographically, the poem is linked to Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes and her experiences of pregnancy and motherhood.
Read Complete AnalysesI am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactites Drip and thicken, tears The earthen womb Exudes from its dead boredom. Black bat airs Wrap me, raggy shawls, Cold homicides. They weld to me like plums. Old cave of calcium Icicles, old echoer. Even the newts are white, Those holy Joes. And the fish, the fish— Christ! They are panes of ice, A vice of knives, A piranha Religion, drinking Its first communion out of my live toes. The candle Gulps and recovers its small altitude, Its yellows hearten. O love, how did you get here? O embryo Remembering, even in sleep, Your crossed position. The blood blooms clean In you, ruby. The pain You wake to is not yours. Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses. With soft rugs— The last of Victoriana. Let the stars Plummet to their dark address, Let the mercuric Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well, You are the one Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.
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