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 wrote "Mirror" in 1961, shortly after having given birth to her first child.
Written from the point of view of a personified mirror, the poem explores Plath's own
fears regarding aging and death. The mirror insists that it objectively reflects the truth
—a truth that greets the woman who looks in the mirror each day as a "terrible"
reminder of her own mortality. She searches the mirror for an image that reflects the
way she sees herself and feels inside, yet finds only an increasingly older woman
staring back. "Mirror" was first published in The New Yorker in 1963 and later
appeared in Crossing the Water, which was published posthumously.
“Mirror” Summary
o The poem is told from the perspective of a mirror, who starts by describing itself
physically as silver-coloured and precise. The mirror insists it has no predetermined
notions or assumptions about anything, and instead simply takes in whatever stands
in front of it right away, exactly the way it is, unclouded by any feelings. The mirror
isn't mean or harsh, but simply honest. It's like a small god's eye, only with four
corners. For the most part, the mirror focuses on the pink, speckled wall that stands
across from it. The mirror has been staring at this wall for so long that it thinks the
wall is in fact an essential part of itself. At the same time, that wall goes in and out of
focus as people and darkness pass in front of it—and into the mirror's line of sight—
again and again.
The mirror becomes the reflective surface of a lake over which a woman leans,
looking intently into the water's depths for some hint of who she is inside. Not finding
it, she directs her attention to the candle she holds or the moon—sources of light that
she thinks must be lying to her by not showing her who she really is. The mirror
watches the woman's back as she walks away, and reflects it accurately. The woman
thanks the mirror by crying and wringing her hands in distress. The mirror knows that
it matters a lot to this woman, who comes back to look into it time and again. Every
day starts with the woman's face taking the place of the darkness that the mirror
reflected all night. The young girl she once was will never look back at her again,
having been metaphorically drowned in the mirror. Instead, as the days go by she
sees only the old woman she has become approaching her like an awful fish.
“Mirror” Themes
Time, Aging, and Mortality
The poem describes a woman seeing herself growing older and older in a mirror
each day—or, more accurately, it describes a personified mirror looking on as the
women’s youth fades. The woman clearly resents getting older and losing her beauty
and youth—two important social currencies for women living in a male-dominated
society, especially in Plath’s day. The poem thus illustrates the anguish of aging, as
the woman confronts her mortality in the mirror each morning.
The first stanza illustrates the objectivity of the mirror, which is only capable of
reflecting what it sees. The mirror describes itself as “the eye of a little god.” Like a
god, the mirror sees things exactly as they are. The mirror has no intentions of its
own; it has no desire to make the woman feel bad about herself. It doesn’t exist to
flatter or insult, but only to reflect appearances truthfully.
The woman, on the other hand, experiences the mirror’s objectivity as a pointed
reminder of her own mortality. As time passes, she ages and becomes further
removed from her youth while getting ever closer to death. The mirror is “important”
to the woman, perhaps because women in particular are so often expected to
conform to rigid standards of beauty and youth. Unfortunately, then, the very parts of
the woman that patriarchal society deems most valuable are also the parts of her that
have a time stamp; they are quickly fading.
Even more upsetting is the question of who she is when these parts of herself fade
away. On the inside, the woman is the same person she’s always been, yet as she
gazes into her reflection each morning, she sees “an old woman / Ris[ing] toward
her, day after day, like a terrible fish.” This description suggests that the woman's
reflection is disconcerting, as if the aging process has made her unrecognizable; her
changing face feels shocking and unreal. And yet, the mirror insists that it is indeed
real. This disconnect between how she feels inside and the harsh reality of the mirror
highlights the horror and difficulty of confronting aging and—because aging inevitably
leads to death—the idea of mortality.
Where this theme appears in the poem:
Lines 1-5
Lines 14-18
Appearance and Identity
While the poem is told from a personified mirror’s point of view, it’s really about the
woman who sees herself in that mirror. This woman is preoccupied with her
reflection, hoping to find in it “what she really is.” Even though the mirror itself is
objective—in other words, it reflects exactly what stands before it—the woman
looking at her reflection still cannot see herself in its image. This, the poem implies, is
because people are so much more than what they look like on the surface; the mirror
only reflects how things appear, not what they are.
The mirror at first presents itself as being totally neutral when it comes to bouncing
images back to its subjects. It is “silver and exact," and doesn’t offer up distorted
reflections that are “misted by love or dislike”—that is, reflections that are influenced
by feelings. Instead, it presents clear and precise images and has “no
preconceptions," meaning that it doesn't have an agenda. It’s not bending its image
to tell a certain story, but simply reflects whatever stands before it.
The mirror, then, is trustworthy; one can count on it to tell the truth. The poem
suggests that the mirror is “not cruel, only truthful.” This speaks to the fact that
although people might not like what they see reflected in the mirror, this isn’t because
the mirror is actively trying to hurt them. After all, it is only capable of reflecting what
stands in front of it.
But the poem goes on to show the ways that the mirror’s objectivity is only skin-deep,
reflecting just the surface of things. The poem metaphorically compares the woman
looking in the mirror to a woman bending over a lake to see her own reflection. When
she searches for this image, she can’t find “what she really is"—that is, she doesn't
gain a true sense of self-understanding. The fact that she isn’t just looking at her
reflection in the lake, but “searching [its] reaches” speaks to her longing to find out
something important about herself—something the poem implies cannot be found in
the mirror, no matter how carefully she looks.
Although the woman searches the "reaches" of the lake-like mirror, the fact remains
that all she can see is a surface-level reflection of herself. This implies that, though
the woman wants to discover something deeper about herself, appearances can only
reveal so much. The mirror might present a seemingly objective representation of
how the speaker looks (even reflecting her image "faithfully" when she turns her
back), but it will never be able to reveal the whole truth about who she is as a person.
There is, after all, much more to people than what meets the eye.
Where this theme appears in the poem:
Lines 1-5
Lines 10-11
Lines 12-14
MOOD:
sadness, clarity
TONE:
Objective, Melancholic
