18.
Sylvia Plath: Poems Summary and Analysis of "Mirror"
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 four-cornered 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.
Overall, "Mirror" is a melancholy and even bitter poem that exemplifies the
tensions between inner and outer selves, as well as indicates the
preternaturally feminine "problem" of aging and losing one's beauty.
