I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears
The speaker dives right into the allegorical aspect of the poem, allowing the underlying reality to reveal itself only slowly and subtly. Plath uses a direct, declarative statement to begin the poem, and then uses a range of sensory images to portray the mine as vividly as possible: the visual imagery of blue light and the aural imagery of dripping water. Moreover, the poem starts with short, clipped sentences, but then assonant "I" and "A" sounds within longer sentences create a slower pace, as if mimicking the strange, winding route of the miner in the cave.
Love, love
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs.
The speaker assures her child that he will be safe and comfortable, creating a scene out of several symbolically loaded images. The roses and rugs she mentions evoke and represent domestic comfort and a certain degree of control over, or at least safety from, nature. The cave evokes the opposite: uncertainty, strangeness, and the inescapability of natural processes. The slant rhyme of this stanza, present in its first and third lines, brings a satisfying feeling of completeness, as if imitating the enclosed safety of the domestic space itself.
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.
At the end of the poem, the speaker directly addresses her son, explicitly sharing the feelings of admiration and hope he induces in her. The enjambed line "You are the one" appears to be a complete thought in and of itself, expressing the speaker's unmatched, even fated feeling of love for her child. But it turns out to be the beginning of a more complex thought: the speaker imagines her child as the only reliable and safe thing in the midst of a cavernous wilderness. The final line of the poem is a firm, end-stopped sentence, which disrupts the speaker's uncertainty and confusion with utter confidence. Alluding to the birth of Jesus, the speaker asserts that her child is a source of comfort and a focus of adoration for many.
