Hello All,
i wanted to post this and get it started, but i was called into work the last few nights. So, Nick and the Candlestick. Many months ago, Norm challenged me (informally mind you) to delve into this poem. S3 was his puzzling introduction. i had already read this poem a few times before talking to Norm about it and hadn't made heads or tails, so i shelved this one until my understanding of her work deepened. Norm's challenge forced me to jump into her work and try to wade through it.
Keep in mind that this poem comes from her Ariel collection and thus was written roughly a year before she died. This poem (for me) shows her departure from early work that had a much more formal feel to it. True free verse. There are stanzas like 13 that sound just amazing when read aloud:
Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well, The title (in typical Sylvia fashion of being somewhere between semi-autobiographical and raw emotion) refers to her son Nicholas and in fact, in a metaphorical sense, could be retitlted Nick
IS the candlestick.
Overall, the poem is about the disheartening ambivalence of the world, and how all of that is (somewhat) redeemed by the purity of this child.
Forgive me if i get a little overboard, but let me jump in on the metaphor. The first line is important. Imagine the cavern as both the N's(narrator's) body and her emotional state. The first line tells us that the N "mines" for precious "ore" within the depths of herself. What does she extract (sorry this line of reasoning is a little uncouth, but i'm hopped up on cold press coffee)?
In S9 and 10, her son's blood is compared to ruby (precious to be sure). Thusly...
Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours. Keeping with this section, she also alludes to salvation through the purity of her newborn son with the first two lines in S9, when she talks about him sleeping in a "crossed position". As if he could take on some of her woes and sin regarding the world and release her from them. This is a very powerful current in the poem's undertow. She returns to this theme in the last stanza, specifically the last line of the poem...
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn. The last line is another reference to Jesus (being born in the barn, of course), while this stanzas L1 and 2 talk more about emotional support in an abstract manner.
Nick is her lifeline.
Returning to S1/L1, "The light burns blue" is another reference to purity of the flame (blue fire oxygen efficient) and within the context of mining, fire was used not only to see by, but as a indicator of safety as well (like birds) to help the miners figure out the changing atmospheric conditions as they progressed that may or may not be sensed by them normally.
Having said all of this (which is not much in the overall scheme of the poem), i will stop here and allow others to accept or reject my opinions. Remember, i did research her son's name, but the remainder of this post is hypothesis only. i don't pretend to fully understand this complex, richly metaphoric poem. i claim only to love it and the mind that put it together. To me, Plath remains ahead of her time. i truly wish she had continued on to give the world more of her fantastic craft.
Interestingly, her daughter, Frieda Hughes has become a published poet in recent years (her first book published in '98 entitled "Wooroloo") and some of her work smacks of Sylvia. She has one or two poems that can be found on
www.poets.org. Enter her name in poet search option in the upper left corner.
That's all for me for now. i will be back to follow up later.
Cheers!
~tim
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Nick and the Candlestick by Sylvia Plath (Read 965 times)
