• It is a short poem that moves around a common household article – a mirror.
• Almost each one of us looks into the mirror everyday. By using the first person narrative , the poetess makes the mirror narrate its own story.
• The mirror is a dispassionate and unbiased observer. It has no prejudices or false notions.
• It reflects persons and things faithfully and objectively. The woman who watches the mirror constantly feels sad to discover that she drowned the young girl that she was in the lake of the mirror and the face of an old woman is rising towards her day by day which looks ugly and hideous like a terrible fish.
Poetic Devices Used
Metaphor
• I am silver & exact.
• I am…the eye of a little god, four cornered.
• Now I am a lake.
Simile
• Like a terrible fish
Personification
The mirror has been personified and been given human characteristics.
• Judgement : I have no preconceptions.
• Sight : whatever I see I swallow immediately just as it is.
• Temperament : (unbiased) - unmisted by love or dislike.
-I am not cruel
-only truthful
A Synopsis of the Poem
The poem talks about truth related to our own selves.
It explores the relationship that we have with truth, and particularly the truth about our own selves.
In the first verse, Sylvia Plath imagines the thoughts of a mirror, chosen because it is an object we all turn to in search of a kind of truth.
It is presented as objective – ‘exact’ and without ‘preconceptions’, swallowing whatever it sees without a second thought, ’unmisted by love or dislike’.
The mirror is,‘ not cruel, only truthful’ – but truth itself is cruel for human beings, and we turn away from it. Presenting only our backs to those mirrors that offer to show us the unbiased truth.
In the second verse, the mirror is replaced by the lake, something else which humans have traditionally gazed into, in search of their own reflection.
Plath presents us with a woman ‘searching ( the mirror’s) reaches for what she really is, ‘ but the figure cannot bear the truth she finds, and turns her back on it in favour of ‘those liars’-‘ the candles or the moon,’ both images traditionally associated with romance.
Yet we cannot live without knowing the reality about ourselves, even if what we find upsets us- and so each morning the woman is back, even though it is only to cry and wring her hands at what she sees. To know the truth is torture, and yet we continue to torture ourselves.
What makes the poem particularly striking is the viewpoint Plath adopts – she writes as the mirror itself.
This brings an added poignancy to this poem about isolation: the only person more lonely than the receiver of bad news is its bearer, perhaps. The mirror’s life is an unfulfilled one – it can do no more than ‘meditate on the opposite wall’ , and even the dignity of the word ‘meditate’ is undermined by its object, a wall painted pink, with speckles’.
Throughout the poem, it is the mirror which meditates, which has hidden reaches, which has a heart and behaves ‘faithfully’. But the woman ‘comes and goes … day after day’. She merely ‘rewards (it) with tears and an agitation of hands’, turning her back on it and yet unable to stay away, returning every morning to replace the darkness. The relationship between the mirror and the woman is evidently a complex one – they need each other, and yet cause each other pain, too.
In this poem, Plath – who committed suicide less than 18 months later – adopts the mirror’s viewpoint in order to explore her ambivalent feelings about herself.
‘Mirror’ juxtaposes the images of love and cruelty, truth and dislike, flickering light and darkness.
One minute the mirror is ‘a little god’ , the next it is needy and alone. It longs to be loved and yet it is in the woman’s suffering. He receives her ‘tears’ and ‘agitation’ and calls it a ‘ reward’.
Ahead lies a terrible future for the woman. The description of herself as a ‘terrible fish’ --- a cold and emotionless woman --- rises to torture Sylvia Plath.
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