The Speaker
The speaker of this poem is a mother, addressing and caring for a newborn child. She seems to occupy an emotional space that is at once exhilarating and terrifying, deeply lonely and extremely intimate. She compares herself to a miner, navigating the hostile, strange space of a mine. However, while motherhood is frightening, she is not afraid of her child, and instead views him as her companion, comparing him to a candle lighting her way. The vividness and unexpectedness of the imagery she uses lets us know that the speaker is very imaginative, but perhaps also very tired and cut off from reality. Meanwhile, her allusions to Victorian culture and Christianity clue us into broader identity clues—she is likely from a Christian background and living in twentieth-century Britain.
The Baby
The speaker’s child is evidently very young, small, and vulnerable. The metaphorical language used to describe him—a candle on the verge of blinking out, in the midst of a vast cave—makes his vulnerability vivid. So does the fact that he appears to still be nursing, and that he continues to lie in a fetal position, as if still acclimating to life outside the womb. The speaker finds him to be an almost supernatural source of hope and comfort, but the baby himself is quite passive, unable to speak or act for himself.
