Nick and the Candlestick is a poem by British-American writer Sylvia Plath, in which a mother compares herself to a miner in a cave before addressing her newborn child. "Nick and the Candlestick" was first published in Plath's posthumous poetry collection, Ariel (1965). This poem is told from the perspective of a new mother who is struggling to adjust to motherhood. She compares the difficulty of being a mother to that of a miner moving about in a cave, emphasizing both the strange beauty and the terrifying dangers of the cave. The speaker then turns to her newborn, confessing her hopes for him, her desire to protect him, and her feelings of adoration for him. Allusions to Christianity even suggest that the speaker sees her child as a Christ figure. Throughout, Plath emphasizes the emotional intensity of parenthood, and indeed of early childhood as well, stressing the mutual reliance between the speaker and her child.
The poem is written in fourteen free-verse tercets. Like much of Plath's work, it makes extensive use of musical devices such as alliteration, but avoids highly stylized or formal attributes such as end rhyme. It also may, like many of Plath's poems, contain autobiographical content. The "Nick" of the title is likely a reference to Plath's own son, Nicholas.
