Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you 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 a 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.
Commentary
(1932-1963)
This poem is haunting, beautiful, gripping and breaks your heart. There are many websites that discuss this poem, most of them interpret the poem in terms of chronological aging (I list a few below.) I am not so sure. Perhaps Plath refers to emotional aging, the evolution from a lively young woman (pre Ted Hughes?) to an angry depressed suicide waiting to happen. Don’t misunderstand me. Although I am no deep student of the Plath-Hughes relationship I do not believe Hughes can be blamed for Plath’s self-induced demise. They separated in 1962. She wrote this poem in 1961. She killed herself in 1963, three days before Valentine’s Day. Anyway I am digressing from the analysis of Mirror.
Perhaps Plath is telling us that we uncover to ourselves when we are alone who we really are - or who we want to be or we wish we were. Sometimes it takes a while for the self to discover who he/she is or is not. And maybe that discovery unveils the self to be an angel, at other times it discloses the self to be a terrible fish. Which are you? If you are unhappy with your answer don’t worry. Time changes everything.
Thr following biography is from Biography.com: Plath, Sylvia 1932 – 1963
Writer. Born October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Plath’s father, a German immigrant, was a professor of biology and a leading expert on bumblebees. An autocrat at home, he insisted his wife give up teaching to raise their two children. He died at home after a lingering illness that consumed the energy of the entire household and left the family penniless. Sylvia’s mother went to work as a teacher and raised her two children alone. Plath was an outstanding student. She won a scholarship to Smith College, published her first short story, “Sunday at the Mintons,” in Mademoiselle while she was still in college, and won a summer job as “guest managing editor” at the magazine. After the job ended, she suffered a nervous breakdown, tried to commit suicide, and was hospitalized. She returned to school to finish her senior year, won a Fulbright to England, and went to Cambridge after graduation, where she met poet Ted Hughes in February 1956. They married four months later. Plath took a job teaching at Smith, which she kept for a year before quitting to write full time. She and Hughes lived in Boston, and she attended poetry workshops with Robert Lowell, whose confessional approach to poetry deeply influenced her. Hughes won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1959 and the couple returned to England, where Plath had her first child. Her first poetry collection, Colossus, was published in 1960 to favorable reviews. The couple bought a house in Devon and had a second child in 1962, the same year that Plath discovered her husband was having an affair. He left the family to move in with his lover, and Plath desperately struggled against her own emotional turmoil and depression. She moved to London and wrote dozens of her best poems in the winter of 1962. Her only novel, The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical account of a college girl who works at a magazine in New York and suffers a breakdown, was published in early 1963 but received mediocre reviews. With sick children, frozen pipes, and a severe case of depression, Plath took her own life in February 1963 at age 30. Hughes edited several volumes of Plath’s poetry, which appeared after her death, including Ariel(1965), Crossing the Water (1971), and Collected Poems (1981), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. He received criticism for publishing a severely edited version of his wife’s journals, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, in
1982. After Hughes’ own death in 1998, Plath’s journals were published in full, as The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath,Links discussing Mirror:
http://www.smithtown.k12.ny.us/highschl/depts/english/fc/mirror.htm
http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/plath/mirror.html
— Ronald
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Certz4 · 24 February 2003
Can you PLEASE help me out with the poem called Mirror by Sylvia Plath, I have read this poem so many times and I have no clue what its about and I have to answer some questions on this poem and I dont know what to write. Can you give me tell me what human characteristics it has in the first stanza and could you also tell me in what ways the mirror is not fully human? If you could help me out a little bit I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
Sevierls · 9 April 2004
I have studied Mirror by Sylvia Plath for my grade 8 drama exam, and the ideas put forward in your coments were the comments that I thought the poem was about and I just wanted to say that I’m glad that someone else thinks the same! Anyway just thought I’d say that.
‘Z’
frith · 30 April 2004
this poem as put up on site is about the concept of ageing and how women cant deal will the process of it and always want thier youth to come back ….i mean they find it difficult to accept the part & parcel of what comes with ageing and also the concept of the mirror to show and interpret everything as it is and not colour it with its own thought etc…also in the poem it is shown how important a mirror is to a woman even though she may not accept the image of her ageing self still she comes back day after day before the mirror
Evelynmccomb · 29 September 2004
It is talking about your reflection.the mirror shows you for who you are and tells no lies just truth. When it shows you flaws it is not being cruel, just truthful. Every line is a description of a mirror. It is using personification to demonstrate the mirror using human details.
Gerus04 · 1 October 2004
Grrr. The second line of that poem is wrong!
Rikudaholic · 18 January 2005
right now, i’m in the middle of writing a paper on “mirror” for my 11th grade english class, (i know i shouldn’t be procrastinating) and i see it quite differently than any other interpretation i’ve seen so far on the internet. the mirror is a hypocrite! The mirror uses an assertive tone and natural (lake, fish, moon), spiritual (meditation, little god) and cosmic imagery (passage of time- aging, light/dark) to try to prove that it is an emotionless, non-judgmental, inanimate object, however, its description of itself and the woman who owns it reveals that it actually does have emotions and make judgments like jealousy over the candles & moon and judging the woman’s motives for using the mirror & aging. hope you find this interesting.
Ms. Mar-chan · 23 June 2005
The Narcissus allusion is particularly important, and I wish you’d touched on that. While the mirror is certainly important, its role as the judgmental narrator–in spite of claims to the contrary–is more important than what it means to the woman.
The Pope · 3 February 2006
This is about reflection.
The mirror described with an almost clinical accuracy, reflects only what is there. It is the reflections of the beholder that can be cruel.
The lake has no description. It simply is. Unlike the mirror it has depth, movement, and can drown, reflected in the lines of the verse, but not described as such. The lake reflects out what is inside, not back what is inside, the person.
The lake is the person, the mirror a reflection of the person.
Anna Hensley · 7 May 2006
the second line is wrong it should be “Whatever I see I swallow immediately”
Matthew Hanley · 31 May 2006
i think this poem is one that may hint at cuicied, i got this from analizing the poem. as you read into it the poem hints on the idea that we get old and die, almost like she thinks life is a waste
Laura Wilson · 11 September 2007
hi my name is Ruby i am 10 years of age and i live in the uk.
Today we learnt about this poem in school, I think it was very complicated and deep. it certainly made me think. The words in this poem were picked out carefully and i thought that it was quite sad.