"Nick and the Candlestick" / "Daddy" / "Balloons"

Link To Poems:

• "Nick and the Candlestick"
• "Daddy"
• "Balloons"

An Introduction

The “black shoe” the subject speaks of in the second passage makes clear the suffocating fixity of masculinity that Plath sees as central to the early 1960’s female experience. It is the confining walls of this environment that entrap her and render the woman a “foot”, on one level dislocated and fragmented from her body as well as being bound by the rigid expectations of her paternal ‘Daddy’. Across the passages, therefore, there arises a conflict between the oppressive forces of the poet’s society and, as in ‘Balloons’, an ascendant female spirit unchained and effervescent on its “invisible air drifts”. For Plath, the state of womanhood is thus a complex one, far more contradictory than the patriarchal dictates enforcing contentment for the female subject through the domestic sphere. Not only are both her maternal and poetic creativity fragile and ephemeral, as the imagery of these insubstantial yet uplifting currents suggest, constantly at risk from this “black” and ominous “foot” of patriarchy, but societal expectations regarding motherhood seem to suppress and “weld” to the subject, rather than offering any clear form of liberation. And so, in both the oscillating tone and form of these poems, the poet aims to challenge one-dimensional perceptions of woman and mother as solely a role of contentment and spiritual fulfillment, offering up instead visions that bely a more opaque and conflicting experience.

Up

The “guileless and clear” balloons of the third passage, with their insistence on something altogether pure and uncomplicated, become suggestive of an uplifting and innocent form of liberated female freedom. These vibrant “globes of…red, green” have “lived with[in]” the household, suggesting the subject’s desire for inclusivity, one that erodes the potentially intrusive force that “they” might pose in the form of something foreign and hostile. By incorporating these balloons intimately inside the confines of her own locale, there is also an emergent possibility for a distinctly natural creativity, one that works in harmony with motherhood, rather than necessarily antagonising it. These ebullient and vibrant forces who, much like the female population, take up “half the space”, thus imbue the passage with an effervescing vitality, a liveliness that becomes reflected in the cadences of the poem, as the enjambment promotes an effusive forward momentum – “Delighting/The heart”. Indeed, the pervasiveness of the present continuous tense –  “taking up”, “moving and rubbing”, “scooting” – gestures towards a continual state of movement and progression whose perpetual activity would work to explain the more passive speaker’s initial perturbation at its presence. Such a quality of optimism becomes all the more distinct, especially when contrasted against the chilling, icy “cave” that the voice of the first poem inhabits. In ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, the caesura and end-stopped finality of the opening line – “I am a miner. The light burns blue” – immediately communicates in its perfunctory melancholy and clipped vowels an enervating form of entrapment, an environment that suffocates life given how the flame has been reduced to its asphyxiated “blue”. In contrast to the fervent activity and uplifting exuberance that pervades the initial stanzas of the third passage, Plath presents us here, at least initially, is a world of “waxy stalactites” and “icicles” that drip downwards towards a distinctly more oppressive and lifeless scene. Though the voice may find herself in an “earthen”, and therefore perhaps natural and nurturing, “womb”, the “white” and brittle walls of “calcium” portend a fatal fragility to the mother’s existence. And so, set against the sombre and mostly barren household depicted in passage one, the unbounded “free peacocks” become a colourful reminder for Plath of the distinct potential for a burgeoning sense of a lively female poetics. Even as such fecund creativity is ultimately quashed by the brother, the reader is nonetheless challenged to confront this progressive possibility, the “queer moons” of femininity that the voice finds solace in, “instead of dead furniture”. Thus, in their allusive nod to Robert Graves’ Moon Goddess and the symbol of a fluid, potent female identity that this represents, the balloons posture towards an active female voice, one that, if not permanently, can at least temporarily uplift and inspire.

I, I, I, ...

In the second passage, however, the subject is contradictorily rendered subservient to her ‘Daddy’, and thereby Plath aims to remind her readership of how overt masculinity works to oppress and wrangle attempts to emerge outside the bounds of patriarchy across the passages. The almost comical repetition of rhyme – “do”, “Achoo”, “blue”, “du” – evokes a strong aural link between the subject and the poem’s opening word “You”; though she may seem to be in control of the poetic medium, this independency is constantly supplanted and replaced by a preeminent focus on the male. Hence, an evocation of how this “Ghastly statue”, in all its ugly weight and permanence, symbolises a forceful masculinity that comes to dominate the voice’s line of thought, even subliminally. Combined with the suggestion of an infantilised female subject that the title evokes, this rhyme scheme also subtly draws links between the infantile cooing of a baby, thereby implicating a hesitant and dependent poetic voice, one that in some sense seems to require the certitude that this “Marble-heavy, bag” provides. In the lexicon of stasis and impenetrability that pervades this poem – “the roller”, “Panzer-man” – Plath therefore establishes a sense of how such obduracy deforms and bends the female identity into a state of subservience. After all, the subject has been “scraped flat” by “wars, wars, wars”, defaced by an inexorably combative and antagonised battlefield of personal relations. The consequences of such violent subjugation are made clear in the stuttering and incoherent quality that mars the speaker’s voice – “Ich, ich, ich, ich”, “your gobbledygoo” – as Plath presents the reader with an uncertain and indecisive narrator, one that, as the repetitive and grating aural quality suggests, is struggling to move past ‘I’, to arrive at and thereby define her own identity in the face of this domineering paternal presence. Indeed, even the volatile creativity of the third passage’s speaker risks becoming tamped by the male. The forceful connotations of the brother “making his balloon squeak” conveys, as was the case with the “roller” of the second poem, a masculine hand that feels justified in actively imposing itself on the female, or, as in this passage, her poetic license. Moreover, through the third passage’s transition from flowing cadences and polysyllabic descriptions – “scooting to rest, barely trembling” – to the blunt, staccato rhythms of the closing tercets – “Then sits/Back, fat jug” – Plath evokes a sense of how such freedoms are constrained, in some ways, cannot survive, in a world of such heavy and suppressive masculinity. And whilst the younger brother may illuminate the constraints of motherhood, the fact that poet is talking to her daughter about “your” brother establishes a feminine bond between the two, as they can only observe how their “funny” and innocent “pink world” can so quickly become forcefully destroyed into a “red shred” by this tense “little fist” of a violent masculinity.

Creative Destruction

More generally, Plath explores not only the constrictive and erosive paternal presence of her 1960’s society, but also a conflicting endearment regarding the expected roles placed on her as a mother. As the subject of the first passage wakes at night, the home, conventionally thought of as a sanctuary of comforts, devolves into a “cold” and morbid locale of “dead boredom”. The sinister imagery evoked in the assonant “vice of knives” speaks to a feeling of both pain and entrapment; that is, the voice can only passively observe the “black bat airs” that “wrap” her, or the “piranha/Religion, drinking” a communion from her toes. In some sense, the repetitive allusions here to central tenets of the Judaeo-Christian faith that drain and enervate the narrator, makes clear Plath’s attendant critique of how her Western society’s subscription to such an inherently patriarchal ontology erodes the mother, especially in the confines of the 1960’s notion of a ‘nuclear household’ where the woman is relegated to a perennial state of inferiority and deference to the family patriarch. At the same time, the poet works to communicate a sense of how such demands of maternity and life-giving simultaneously drain her of her blood, her creative vitality and energy. Yet as the candle’s “yellows hearten”, there is a palpable shift away from the lifeless tone of ennui that defined the early stanzas – “Even the newts are white, / Those holy Joes” – and towards a more protective and fond quality, an affection more in line with conventional depictions of motherhood. Certainly, her confusion as to how the baby got “here”, whilst perhaps evincing an underlying disconnect between mother and son, when combined with the baby’s “crossed position” seems to suggest that the speaker wishes to return him to her womb, to protect him from the “cold homicides” of her world and to likely reaffirm a sense of her own definitive identity as a mother once more. Contrasted against passage three, where the voice’s son “bites” and in doing so destroys the balloon in which she saw the potential for her own artistic liberation, he is, in ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, the “one/Solid the space lean on”, a presence of reliability that offers the otherwise effaced mother – the vacant “space” – a reassuring form of protection and inspiration. Indeed, as the poem’s title evinces, Plath attempts to draw links here between the new-born life and her own subsequent lightness and revitalised aspect. And so, through the complex and at times conflicting depictions of the female experience, particularly as it relates to the strains of motherhood on attempts of cultivating any semblance of a professional life, Plath intends to subvert and problematise any simplistic visions of her and other women’s life in this society; the baby can both “eat” and destroy, but also be a form of salvation, a “baby in the barn”.