Before "Nick and the Candlestick" even begins, its title creates expectations about the poem's content. In particular, the title's rhyme and imagery alludes to the classic nursery rhyme "Jack Be Nimble":
Jack be nimble.
Jack be quick.
Jack jump over the candlestick.
As a result, it would be reasonable to expect that the verse that follows is lighthearted and suitable for children. In reality, its elaborate metaphors are often difficult to decipher, while its language skews dark and gloomy. This becomes clear within the poem's first few lines, which describe a miner searching an eerie cave by dying candlelight. This initial passage thus introduces tension between the poem's nursery rhyme connotations and its sinister mood, which will reflect the speaker's personal ambivalence towards motherhood.
These lines also establish the poem's central conceit—the speaker compares her experience of motherhood to a miner traversing a cave. By pointing out her dying candle, the speaker suggests that her resources are running thin, the cave is dim, and she struggles to navigate it. Furthermore, mining is known as a dangerous line of work, with the goal of extracting some valuable material. These underlying connotations implicitly begin to shape the poem's meaning.
The simple and language and sentence structure in the poem's opening line also make its meaning clear. These direct statements of fact establish the speaker's authority and credibility before launching the reader into a series of complex metaphors.
Lines 2-5 continue to characterize the cave. From its roof hangs stalactites—tapered structures created by trickling water, which deposits minerals slowly over time. These might be symbolic of the speaker's breasts filled with milk to nurse her child. Yet the speaker calls the drippings "tears," suggesting sadness, and the cave becomes "the earthen womb."
This metaphor signals that the poem is concerned with motherhood and that the cave represents the speaker's body—insinuations that will become clearer later. Moreover, line 5 indicates that the cave is inactive through the use of pathetic fallacy, as it experiences "dead boredom." This form of personification portrays the cave as a living thing—albeit one that is nearly bored to death—and can be interpreted as a commentary on the speaker’s newly-empty womb.
As the poem opens, its meter features a high concentration of stressed syllables, giving it force. However, this gives way to a more iambic (unstressed-stressed) meter with isolated stresses that mimick dripping water. Assonance and consonance exaggerate the rhythm by calling additional attention to syllables that receive metrical stress:
I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears
Assonance and consonance continue throughout this passage, creating slant and internal rhymes among "womb," "from," and "boredom." These clusters of repeating sounds draw the audience in and bridge abrupt, enjambed line breaks.