Mirror (1963). Content and Description

“Mirror” first appeared in the New Yorker in 1963 and was later published in Crossing the Water: Transitional Poems (1971), a posthumous collection containing both poems written during the time Plath wrote The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and those that predate and coincide with the Ariel poems, which, published in 1965, just two years after her death, propelled her into fame. Like Crossing the Water’s title poem with its ominous language (“The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes”), “Mirror” is a dark, brooding poem, one in which the speaker—a personified mirror on a wall, “silver and exact”—reflects a terrifying vision of the self.

In the first several lines the mirror describes itself as objective, without “preconceptions” and “unmisted by love or dislike”—an impartial observer that swallows everything it sees. Ironically, although the mirror is personified, it comments on the world with detached, unemotional observations that, despite the speaker’s claim of being “not cruel, only truthful,” lack the sympathetic, understanding attributes we normally associate with human perception. The first stanza opens with descriptions we often associate with a child’s game, descriptive statements designed to engender guessing, clues given as if a riddle is being posed.

Here the juxtaposition of a childlike tone and bleak images creates not only ambiguity but also confusion, leading the reader to question the veracity of the speaker’s statements and observations. Distanced from the reader with its narcissistic vision, the mirror gazes at a pink, speckled wall, which, although the speaker believes (note the connotative language and shift to subjectivity) is part of the mirror’s heart, remembers the many times that mirror and wall have been separated by “faces and darkness.” Pivoting on this spectral image, the speaker in the second stanza describes itself as a lake—an image of depth, the unknown, drowning, and death—over which a woman seeking to understand herself bends.

The speaker, which has described itself as a “little god” distanced from human affairs in the opening stanza, now admits it derives a sadistic pleasure in the reflection it provides, seeing the woman’s increasing agitation and tears as a “reward.” In this way it describes itself as a distant, destructive yet creative force, a thing from which a woman derives her notions of what is real. As the speaker, now a lake, depicts how the woman’s image “replaces the darkness,” the speaker reveals that it is aware of the powerful effect it has and the increasing toll time has taken on the woman.

The water’s reflective surface dashes the vision of a young girl the woman has harbored and replaces it with a horrific image of an old woman rising “toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” Thus, the speaker, both mirror and lake, makes the woman aware of time, change, and mortality. She gazes into the watery surface, seeking a vision of what is truthful and simultaneously recoiling from the horrific vision that supplants any idealist vision of herself and separates her from her environment. As a meditation on Plath’s increasing instability, a vision of her mortality, a foreshadowing of her suicide, “The Mirror” portrays a desperate woman who seeks to see a whole, integrated human being but who is bound, as is Shakespeare’s Ophelia or Virginia Woolf, to a watery pool.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Many of Plath’s poems contain mirror images. Explore mirror images in the following poems: “Face Lift,” “Totem,” “Last Words,” “Morning Song,” “Insomniac,” “The Courage of Shutting Up,” “Leaving Early,” “Purdah,” and “The Couriers.” What do these images have in common? How do they differ? With your own insights in mind, write a well-developed essay on mirror imagery in Plath’s poetry.

2. Read Claribel Alegria’s “I Am Mirror” (1978). Then, compare the ways Alegria uses the mirror to reflect Salvadoran life with the way Plath uses the mirror to reflect the speaker’s self and the world. After considering both poets’ use of mirrors, write an essay that explores Alegria’s poem as a response to Plath’s.

3. The first line of the second stanza, “Now I am a lake,” alludes to the mythological figure Narcissus. Read about the Narcissus myth in Bullfinch’s Mythology, which can be accessed at http://www. bartleby.com/181/132.html, and note the way other writers have used the myth. With the knowledge you have acquired in mind, think about why Plath evokes this mythological figure. Write a well- developed essay that explores Plath’s use of the Narcissus myth and its significance in interpreting “Mirror.”

4. “Mirror” deals with representation: the way things in the real world are reflected in literature. If, on one level, the poem is about poetry, what is Plath saying about poetic perception and about the act of creating poetry?

5. The final image in the poem is alarming and stands in stark contrast to the more objective reflections the mirror provides. First of all, consider the difference between objective and subjective perception, the way the two relate and are also complementary. Then, write an essay on the significance of this final image, which, depending on the way you interpret it, may be seen as a more subjective reflection of the speaker.

6. As Tracy Brain describes, two interesting lines from “Mirror” did not make the final edit. In these lines, “the eponymous speaker imagines itself with legs, walking from its room and into the world so that it can show others their reflections: ‘The trees and the stones would know where they stood. / The trees would not dream of redness, nor the stones of transparency’” (29). In a well-developed essay, argue where these two lines might fit best in the poem and how such an addition might alter the poem’s meaning(s).