Mirror

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.

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.

Sylvia Plath

S1 – The mirror becomes a person with person attributes. Swallowing is equivalent to reflecting back whatever is in front of the mirror. The mirror is in a room facing a pink wall so it takes on this skin. From time to time faces and darkness separate the mirror from the pink wall which has become its ‘heart’. Whatever it reflects it tells the truth with no emotional response so in a way it is likened to a God being totally honest.

S2 – A lake is personified but this is different from the mirror. A woman (SP) is trying to explore the depths to find out who she really is and when she looks elsewhere there is no faithful reflection. Candles have romantic connotations and the moon insanity. When she cries the lake likes her wet tears. She may touch the water with her hands which is liked equally by the lake. She comes to the lake often and the lake faithfully shows her aging day after day. In her search for identity she has drowned her youth at the same time she is unaccepting of the aging process fearing the future and becoming a fish, a terrible fish the product of a life.

The water in the lake can be regarded as time. Eventually she will be drowned in the lake as time takes its toll. Time will drown us all – well that’s one way of putting it. Whether we become an ugly fish or a beautiful sea-horse is another matter. SP often considered death in her work and in this poem she considers self-discovery, aging and death with a some what depressive outlook on the future.

Sylvia Plath on Wikipedia.