Summary
"Nick and the Candlestick" begins with the speaker stating that she is a miner. She describes the mine in which she finds herself, which is cold, damp, and dark—and emotionally depressing and boring. The images she lists, somewhat impressionistically, include dripping stalagmites, blue light, swooping bats, and, somewhat enigmatically, "cold homicides." The speaker also compares the cave to a womb. As her description deepens, she focuses on the creatures within, who are bleached from lack of light: pale white fish and newts, which seem to try and eat her toes as if taking their first communion. The speaker's candle threatens to snuff out, but recovers its light.
Analysis
In this first half of the poem, it's not especially evident that the mine being described is an allegorical representation of motherhood. Small hints suggest a relationship, which becomes clearer in the poem's latter half. Among these are the reference to a womb—a particularly fascinating moment, suggesting that the speaker now sees her own body as an unknown, unnavigable place. Images of blue light and darkness suggest that the speaker is up late, or else up very early, caring for her child. Meanwhile, images of strange, underdeveloped creatures eating her body hint that she is nursing the baby. None of these, again, are anything more than suggestions. But as we navigate the rest of the poem, these moments show that the speaker's allegory is very much intertwined with her physical reality. She experiences the mine, not as a broadly metaphorical representation of hardship, but as a highly concrete and specific setting. The conditions experienced in the mine—physical discomfort, darkness, solitude, and symbiosis with alien-seeming beings—are only surreal exaggerations of the very normal conditions of parenthood.
At the same time, as much as the poem riffs on well-known elements of the real world, Plath clearly isn't trying to portray an easily navigable or sensible reality. Instead, she creates an impression of senselessness and disjointedness. These impressions are rooted in both unusual grammatical structures and surreal imagery. Take the final word of stanza one, "tears." It's not clear at first whether this is a noun, referring to tears in the sense of crying, or a verb. The start of the next stanza seems to reveal that it is a verb, and that Plath is describing something that "tears/The open womb." Yet the following line once again pulls the rug from under us, informing us that the womb "Exudes from its dead boredom." This is an odd phrase in itself, its meaning somewhat unclear. But it also causes us to rethink our previous impressions—if the womb exudes, how is it possible (semantically or syntactically) that something also tears the womb? This is only one instance of the poem not quite making sense. Phrases like "weld to me like plums" are deeply strange, since plums aren't known to weld. Nearly everything in the poem's first half has a meaning that is, at the very least, ambiguous. This means that we experience the poem impressionistically, its images working in conjunction to create a broad sense of fantastical unease rather than to tell a highly cohesive story. Moreover, the lack of cohesion here suggests that the speaker is having trouble making sense of her world. Perhaps she is sleep-deprived and exhausted, as new parents often are. Perhaps she is emotionally overwhelmed as well, unable to neatly fit her feelings into a sensible narrative.
Even while the events of the poem are mysterious, the poem's form offers a grounding predictability. It comes to us in a neat series of tercets, or three-line stanzas. While it has no predictable rhyme scheme or meter, this form gives us something to hold on to and feel sure of. Short stanzas, and short lines, offer readers constant opportunities to rest and reflect on what they have read. Without these periods of rest, it would be difficult to make sense of this surreal work. At the same time, short lines mean that we get many line breaks—and, as a result, Plath gives herself many opportunities for the kinds of syntactic twists and turns described above. In other words, the poem's form simultaneously gives readers a feeling of greater control over the text, and gives the poet a greater number of ways to wrest control from readers, just when they think they're on solid ground.
