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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/143643/sylvia-plath-nick-and-the-candlestick

“In “Nick and the Candlestick,” a woman walks through a dark house toward her sleeping infant, and this ordinary action becomes fused with a metaphoric descent into a ghostly otherworld. Addressed to Plath’s son, Nicholas, the poem belongs to the tradition of poems such as Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Yeats’s “A Prayer for my Daughter” that directly address a poet’s sleeping infant. “Nick and the Candlestick,” however, teems with evocations of the speaker’s pregnancy and continually merges these images with descriptions of the baby himself. Like the poem’s opening fusion of metaphor and reality, this conflation collapses the boundaries between two things: past and present, memory and experience. In the poem, pregnancy is, itself, a time when two individuals are contained in one strangely altered body. As such, pregnancy, like metaphor itself, becomes emblematic of both the tenuousness of distinctions and of the inevitability of transformation.

As in many her poems, Plath borrows language and imagery from nursery rhymes, harnessing their peculiar mixture of menace and cheerful, linguistic playfulness—a juxtaposition that mirrors the poem’s insistence that seemingly disparate emotions or states of being are often closely entwined. This poem’s title recalls an old rhyme:

Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
The candlestick.

If Jack is not nimble, after all, he risks setting himself on fire. “

I want the pain to leave  and I shan’t grieve
I’ve had enough  today and evermore
For mourning mourning’s hard for the bereaved

I think of God and whether I believe
Although to him or her I’m just one fewer
I want the pain to leave  and I shan’t grieve

I wonder if some new work I’d conceive
For God, I have not  got infinite allure
Is mourning squared too hard for the bereaved?

Maybe I’d do better to perceive.
Does God believe in me, does love endure?
I want the pain to leave  and I shan’t grieve

In  my heart, I wish  peace were achieved
Does Jesus want me,  in sorrow so immured
Yet mourning mourning’s right for the bereaved

For life like this, death is the final door
But when it opens what will we see there?
I want the pain to leave;I shall not grieve
In mourning mourning’s  rites  I was conceived

Since arguing is dangerous for our hearts
How can we respond when people start?
We might say, maybe you are right.
Jesus was born on the Isle of Wight.

Or if they say that prayer’s a waste of time.
Say you only read prayers for their rhymes.
Or that you have so much time now you are old
You think you’ll try it as you’re feeling bold

If they say you  lack intelligence
Tell them you’re an imbecile with pence.
My IQ is only 65
But with hard work or luck ,I won the prize

“A survey of new algebra” I won
I’ve has it 50 years and I ain’t done.

I got a doughnut for the second prize
Topology is great  for telling lies

I read all Euclid  when I was a kid
It came in handy in the marriage bed!

I like the cubic forms around your eyes
And tell me, can I guess what’s your bra size?

The Temple builders estimated pi.
Tried to square the circle with their eyes.

A diagram or picture is my style
An  oral   maths test  makes feel surprised

Shall I give home to grievance and  to woe

And cultivate my hatred with my tears?

Shall I remember  carefully each blow,

And add this sorrow to my anxious fear?



I  thought by hating you I would have peace;

And surely I had reason without doubt.

Yet rumination  gave me no release.

For wisdom and compassion, it did flout



I remembered our  past love and  our shared  words

I gave them freedom in my anguished heart.

I did it for your sake, yet then occurred

A sweetness, joy and gladness in all parts.



To  forgive, repent and  let go of such grief

Helps us more than hatred’s legal briefs