Mirror
By Admin
•
January 09, 2021
•
3,700 views
Advertisement
Sylvia Plath
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
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.
40
EN1215_British & American Literature_content credits to original creators_Uploaded by Nisal Wanigasuriaya
Summary
In this poem, a mirror describes its existence and its owner, who grows older as the mirror watches.The mirror
first describes itself as ―silver and exact.‖ It forms no judgments, instead merely swallowing what it sees and
reflecting that image back without any alteration. The mirror is not cruel, ―only truthful.‖ It considers itself a fourcornered eye of a god, which sees everything for what it is.
Most of the time, the mirror looks across the empty room and meditates on the pink speckled wall across from
it. It has looked at that wall for so long that it describes the wall as ―part of my heart.‖ The image of the wall is
interrupted only by people who enter to look at themselves and the darkness that comes with night.
The mirror imagines itself as a lake. A woman looks into it, trying to discern who she really is by gazing at
her reflection. Sometimes, the woman prefers to look at herself in candlelight or moonlight, but these are
―liars‖ because they mask her true appearance. Only the mirror (existing here as lake) gives her a faithful
representation of herself.
Because of this honesty, the woman cries and wrings her hands. Nevertheless, she cannot refrain from visiting
the mirror over and over again, every morning. Over the years, the woman has ―drowned a young girl‖ in the
mirror, and now sees in her reflection an old woman growing older by the day. This old woman rises toward
her out of the mirror like ―a terrible fish.‖
Analysis
In this short but beloved poem, the narrator is a wall mirror in what is likely a woman's bedroom. The mirror is
personified - that is, it is endowed with human traits. It is able to recognize monotony, commenting on the regularity of
the wall that it reflects most of the time. Further, while it does not offer moral judgment, it is able to observe and
understand its owner (the woman) as she grapples with the reality of aging.
Compared to most of the others in Plath's oeuvre, this poem is not particularly difficult to analyze. Though the speaker is
a mirror, the subjects are time and appearance. The woman struggles with the loss of her beauty, admitting each day that
she is growing older. Though the woman occasionally deludes herself with the flattering "liars" candlelight and
moonlight, she continually returns to the mirror for the truth. The woman needs the mirror to provide her with an
objective, unadulterated reflection of self, even though it is often discomfiting, causing her "tears and an agitation of
hands." The mirror is well aware of how important it is to the woman, which evokes the Greek myth of Narcissus, in
which a young man grows so transfixed with his own reflection that he dies.
Some critics have speculated that the woman is vexed by more than her changing physical appearance. They posit that
the woman is observing her mind, her soul, and her psyche, stripped of any guile or obfuscation. By seeing her true self,
she becomes aware of the distinction between her exterior and interior lives. In other words, she might be meditating on
the distinction between a "false" outer self of appearance, and a "true" inner self. After Plath's 1963 suicide, many critics
examined the writer's different facets, contrasting her put-together, polite, and decorous outer self with her raging,
explosively-creative inner self. Perhaps Plath is exploring this dichotomy in "Mirror." The slippery and unnerving
"fish" in the poem may represent that unavoidable, darker self that cannot help but challenge the socially acceptable self.
The critic Jo Gill writes of "Mirror" that even as the mirror straightforwardly describes itself as "silver and exact," it feels
compelled to immediately qualify itself. Gill writes, "as the poem unfolds we see that this hermetic antonym may be a
deceptive facade masking the need for communion and dialogue." The mirror actually dominates and interprets its world,
and thus has a lot more power than it seems to suggest. It does not merely reflect what it sees, but also shapes those
images for our understanding. Gill notes that the poem is catoptric, meaning that it describes while it represents its own
structure; this is down through the use of two nine-line stanzas which are both symmetrical, and indicative of opposition.
The second stanza is significant because it, as Gill explains, "exposes...the woman's need of the mirror [and] the mirror's
need of the woman." When the mirror has nothing but the wall to stare at, the world is truthful, objective, factual, and
"exact," but when the woman comes into view, the world becomes messy, unsettling, complicated, emotional, and vivid.
Thus, the mirror is "no longer a boundary but a limninal and penetrable space." It reflects more than an image - it reflects
its own desires and understanding about the world
Advertisement
Share with Classmates & Study Groups:
Help fellow students
5.0 / 5.0
Found this study material helpful?
Rate our website service and free notes repository on Google Reviews!
Discussion & Study Inquiries (0)
Ask questions, request missing past papers, or share revision tips
No comments yet. Be the first student to start the discussion or request past papers!