The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span
The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine,
And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince
As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock.
The main things I have noticed in this poem are: the amount of colour; the focus on light/reflections/glass; the significance of 'the prince'.
The first stanza creates vibrant images due to the broad range of colours used by Plath. We notice that the shoes are not merely glass as we are used to but 'scarlet'. This conjures up images of promiscuity rather than royal class, so differentiates the girl from her partner. The green eyes are also unusual and often desirable due to their rare nature. 'Green' usually connotes envy but perhaps here it is jealousy in its original sense (she wants the prince all to herself). Then we come to hair of 'silver', once again contradicting the norm, which is blonde. As silver is not as valuable as a golden blonde, perhaps Plath is suggesting the girl is out of place beside a prince (note how she is merely a 'girl', not even 'young lady'); this is her dream but it is a childish one, leading to her 'guilt' as she knows she must leave but also that she has been greedy and naïve. She has cheated both her partner and herself.
I have interpreted the 'glass hall' to symbolise a trap for the girl, in which she is subjected to the male gaze. This is enhanced by the use of the word 'reflecting' at the end of the second stanza. Plath does not use it overtly to say the girl is reflected in a mirror but the natural impulse to see this as her repeated image is there. The 'rose' of the candles is used in various ways. It first suggests love or passion but then is paled by the sudden 'lilac', which clashes with the first in both colour and scent, creating a sickly image, making the atmosphere of the poem more heavy and oppressive. This is matched by the sickly 'revolving' of the dancers, who go through a pattern out of their control as this is high society.
I have noticed that (excluding the final rhyming couplet) the poem is framed by 'the prince'. He first 'leans' to her and then she 'clings' to him. He is therefore the focus of this coupling, the most important, the protector and the lead. By calling the girl 'strange' in the penultimate stanza, Plath might be using indirect discourse to portray the girl in the prince's eyes. If so, he has no romantic thought of her clinging to him and thinks she is but a 'girl' to his royal status, which carries so much more weight.
I suppose the underlying message of this poem is that you can't get what you want by pretending to be something you are not; everyone else will notice. Also, what you want may not be healthy for you, especially for woman who are brought up to want to be beautiful for men but find that this means being controlled by them and patriarchal society (1950s debates over whether women should be allowed to feel desire). The clock, therefore, beckons the girl away from her man because it symbolises the process of ageing, at the end of which no man will want her again due to the fading of her beauty, just as her pallor fades to 'pale' in fear.
After doing some research on the poem now, I realise that it makes sense for me to be a little confused about the poem's messages because it was one of her earlier poems, so she had not mastered the ability to define her opinions, no matter how contradictory, in an easy and subtle way. Nevertheless I like the direction in which she was thinking.
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