Plath's Mirror
Watching Her Aging Face
Plath’s poem, “Mirror,” consists of two unrimed, nine-line verse paragraphs (veragraphs). The theme focuses on the reality of the aging process: the mirror boasts of its remarkable ability to reflect things exactly as they are, as does the lake. But the lake, who is still actually the mirror, also reports the “tears and agitation” of a woman who is watching herself grow old.
The death of Sylvia Plath at the age of thirty gives this poem an eerie quality. By dying at such an early age, the poet precluded any possibility for herself of actually experiencing the aging process of the woman in the poem.
First Versagraph: “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions”
The mirror boasts, “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.” Actually, the mirror uses the first five lines, over half of the first verse paragraph, to proclaim its characteristic of truthfulness. It says it accepts anything given it without trying to change it, because it is not swayed by emotion, implying quite accurately that human beings do not posses these objective qualities.
The mirror reports, “I am not cruel, only truthful,” thus eliminating any ulterior motive for its objective portrayal of the items that come before it. It is the “eye of a little god, four-cornered.” The mirror might be thought to have overstated its case here and might be verging on the human after all.
The mirror then reports what is does habitually: it reflects the “pink, with speckles” on the “opposite wall.” It claims that it has stared at that wall for a long time, so much so that the wall “is part of my heart.” Odd that the mirror, which is so objective and unfeeling, has a heart, but the reader will accept that a heart for a mirror functions somewhat differently from that of the subjective and feeling human being.
The mirror then notes that the objects that come between it and the opposite wall—“faces and darkness”—cause a kind of “flicker.”
Second Versagraph: “Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me”For dramatic effect, the mirror then claims that it is a lake, and a woman is bending over it. The woman is looking at herself in the mirror, “searching [. . .] for what she really is.” The mirror thinks the woman is looking for her real self, but the reader will grasp that the woman is merely demonstrating her obsession with her physical appearance.
The mirror/lake then claims that after it accurately throws back her true appearance, the woman “turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.” The mirror/lake pokes fun at the woman for trying to mask her aging face with false/dim lighting.
For the act of reflecting her appearance “faithfully” for which the mirror/lake would expect gratitude, instead it receives “tears and an agitation of hands.” The woman displays her dissatisfaction with the faithful report, but the mirror/lake understands only that it “is important to her.”
The mirror/lake infers its importance for the woman, because she “comes and goes,” but “Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.” The mirror has come to depend on the woman’s presence every morning. The mirror/lake then makes a profound statement, “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
If Sylvia Plath had written nothing else, this poem would have made her a major twentieth-century poet. At first reading, one might find it a bit odd for a mirror to become a lake. But by having the mirror morph into a lake, the poet can have the speaker make that brilliant final metaphor in the last two lines: “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” Two of the best lines ever written by a poet!
Sylvia Plath
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