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I agree with you, it is an amazing piece.  I would feel like I missed out on something great had I not tried to understand it--I struggle with deciphering symbolism and metaphors, and sometimes vocabulary in poems--so I need to read poems over many times before I get a good picture of what I might be seeing.  My first post was before I did any brainstorming and before looking into the individual stanzas and trying to tie them together into some purposeful message or meaning. 

I agree with you Norm.  I think a poem fails if you have to know the poets biography to understand what he or she is saying.   

A poem should stand alone.  If it is too cryptic to interpret then the poet is writing just for themselves and not to be read by others.

This particular poem can be understood without knowing anything about the writer though a quick google does help with insight as does having read other poems of hers.

For example thanks to Tim posting the earlier Candle poem, I know realise that when Plath talks about the stalactites she means the candles and how the wax dripping looks like tears.

She is the miner holding the candle which represents the baby and he is a light in the darkness of her depression.

Oops, cross-posted with you Norm.

i actually thought of that Nursery Rhyme a while back and i fell back into religion.

~tim

P.S. i am beginning to think that the flame is life itself, for both the child, and the N. Is stanza 6-7 talking about alcoholism?

Hello Terence,

i understand what you are saying, and i think everyone in this thread would agree that this poem is intensely private, opened up for the reader. Thus, it has a semi-bio quality about it and if a reader has researched the poet, then they can make a lot of connections into facts easier. What i was trying to say was reiterated by Norm, if we take only what Sylvia Plath writes for us and try to break-down the meaning, then what is it we come to? Do we have enough information to support the idea of a miscarriage, depression, loneliness, etc.
Of course, my answer is yes to all of those because we have already covered those elements in detail with regards to her writing, and then supported by her bio. i am just trying to get us to stay with the poem, so to speak.

Okay, i want to quote two-and-a-half stanzas from a poem Sylvia Plath wrote two years earlier. They are in fact, the first stanza, the first two line of the second stanza and the last stanza. After reading this, i think you will see the theme of the candle being 'born' and continued in Nick and the Candlestick. This poem was called, simply enough, Candles. 

They are the last romantics, these candles:
Upside down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,
And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,
Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.
It is touching, the way they'll ignore

A whole family of prominent objects
Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye....

I watch their split tears cloud and dull to pearls.
How shall I tell anything at all
To this infant still in a birth-drowse?
Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,
The shadows stoop over like guests at a christening.

Yes, Sylvia Plath wrote 'deeps', not depths. That wasn't my translation mistake. 
i think you can see the introduction to the 'shawl' comparison and already a developing theme relating shadow/light/children. This may not unlock anything else in our discussion, i just thought it would be interesting to see where some of this treatment came from. i could probably trace it back farther, but why?

~tim

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Let me get this straight--because I thought this is what I had just said before--what is the difference between the candle and the candlestick ?~ I just thought they are one in the same.  I was saying the waxy part--the candle--is the body of the child, while the flame was the spirit (life).

With all due respect to you, Tim, and the poet, it IS a very personal poem and her life does have a bearing on its meaning, imo.

As to the analogy to the candlestick, it seems logical to me that the candlestick is the womb, the candle is the physical baby - embryo/fetus - and the flame is the life of the baby. The reference to the light burning blue indicates a danger to the babies life, as it would to a miners, and the possibility of the flame being extinguished, a miscarriage. Again, it is the candle, the body, that gulps and recovers its altitude - becomes more alive, out of danger, as evidenced by the yellowing of the flame.

Hi Norm

Reading through your post and the way wrote about the stalactites and similarly the candlestick gave me a very phallic image. 

Must have been all your talk about intellectual orgasms ???