Alec lounged against the tiled threshold of the bathroom with both arms crossed. He looked relaxed and slightly bored, but there was a terrible darkness in his eyes when he hazarded a glance at her. She was his only weakness, a vulnerability he struggled to hide.
Throughout the poem, Plath interweaves images of light and darkness, gold and silver, fire and water. She suggests that the world is made up of dualities, and that the natural world is a place where these dualities are constantly in flux. The "bright waterlights" that "slide their quoits" down the trees are an image of the fluidity of life, and the way that everything changes and flows like a river.
Ultimately, "Dark Wood, Dark Water" is a poem about the power and mystery of nature. It suggests that the natural world is a place of great beauty and wonder, but also of darkness and danger. The poem invites the reader to explore this world and to confront its many mysteries and contradictions.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
"The deftly wrought poems in Sylvia Byrne Pollack's brave, disarming collection, WHAT LASTS, offer a relentless sightline into mental illness, aging, loss, and gritty hope. The speaker journeys through an Escher maze of challenges and darkness, yet sustains herself with keen appreciations, love of family, and the beauty of the world. What Lasts is ultimately a celebration of fierce tenacity and of life itself."
--Katharine Whitcomb, author of Habitats and The Daughter's Almanac