Mirror by Sylvia Plath
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Mirror by 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.
The mirror describes itself as silver and exact to say that it forms no judgments and merely reflects the image that it sees.
This line sticks out to me because people often look into mirrors, hoping to see something else and expecting to see someone better, but you can only perceive what is actually there.
The mirror says that they have the eye of a little god because like God, they see you truly as you are without any filters or facades. This shows how the mirror is able to view anyone as purely as they are whether or not the truth is positive or negative
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.
Well done. You have greatly influenced my opinion on candles and the moon, especially as idealized images
The woman responds to her truth filled reflection of herself with insecure agitation and tears of sadness in distaste of the truth that lies before her
The author uses this section to explain what the mirror sees day by day as the lady ages in front of her
and rewarding the lake with tears suggest that she’s not fond of what she sees.
The mirror facilitates a loss of innocence as the woman goes about life preoccupied solely by their appearance. She is also a terrible fish and not a little girl anymore
The author uses the fish metaphor to reveal the unavoidable nature of aging, since age is sneaking up on the woman like a fish who has found its prey.
Good analysis of Plath’s use of the fish in her metaphor about aging!
I agree the ending simile of her the fish show her disgust towards her appearance
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The author uses two stanzas to emphasize the idea of mirrors and reflections, as the stanzas reflect each other like mirrored images; Sylvia Plath’s choice in how to present her poem goes hand and in hand with its contents.
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