They are the last romantics, these candles: <br />Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers, <br />And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes, <br />Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints. <br />It is touching, the way they'll ignore <br /> <br />A whole family of prominent objects <br />Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye <br />In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds, <br />And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all. <br />Daylight would be more judicious, <br /> <br />Giving everybody a fair hearing. <br />They should have gone out with the balloon flights and the stereopticon. <br />This is no time for the private point of view. <br />When I light them, my nostrils prickle. <br />Their pale, tentative yellows <br /> <br />Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments, <br />And I remember my maternal grandmother from Vienna. <br />As a schoolgirl she gave roses to Franz Josef. <br />The burghers sweated and wept. The children wore white. <br />And my grandfather moped in the Tyrol, <br /> <br />Imagining himself a headwaiter in America, <br />Floating in a high-church hush <br />Among ice buckets, frosty napkins. <br />These little globes of light are sweet as pears. <br />Kindly with invalids and mawkish women, <br /> <br />They mollify the bald moon. <br />Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry. <br />The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open. <br />In twenty years I shall be retrograde <br />As these drafty ephemerids. <br /> <br />I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls. <br />How shall I tell anything at all <br />To this infant still in a birth-drowse? <br />Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her, <br />The shadows stoop over the guests at a christening.<br /><br />Sylvia Plath<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/candles-8/
