All three poems generally convey Sylvia Plath’s speaker’s emotions and feelings towards the people surrounding them and several inevitabilities such as old age. In “Mirror” the poem, although it is written in the first person, is written as if she is a neutral object observing another person. The speaker is the mirror observing someone else’s emotions towards the mirror, “she rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands,” this is Plath’s reflection on old age and how women are afraid of the future as it is often associated with imperfection and the unknown. The speaker is afraid of the future because she doesn’t know what will happen as her beauty will eventually fade and she with each day she is slowly approaching death. This can be linked to “The Arrival of The Bee Box.” The speaker, although afraid of the unknown in the box, “there are no windows, so I can’t see what’s in there,” is fascinated with the danger that lies within it. This can be linked to “Bluebeard” in which the speaker, once again is strangely drawn to Bluebeard even though she knows he is dangerous, “my X-rayed heart, dissected body,” she knows that Bluebeard will dissect her and yet she seems slightly reluctant to give back the key as she repeats herself as if to convince herself that what she is doing is right, “I am sending back the key…I am sending back the key.” So even though the speaker is afraid of what she will find, she is still strangely drawn to it like the woman in “Mirror.”
The woman in “Mirror” hates what she sees in the mirror and yet she still visits it daily, like a ritual and worships it even though she despises what it shows her, “the eye of a little god, four-cornered.” This is suggesting that the mirror is like a deity to the woman who constantly comes to “search my reaches for what she really is” by coming to the mirror every day expecting the image to have changed somehow. A lake’s image does not show a smooth reflection but instead the image is distorted and altered, producing no definite truth unlike the “not cruel, only truthful” mirror. The search in the mirror is the woman’s search for herself, for the “drowned young girl” desperate to find the image she wants. Although the “drowned young girl” is dead and there is no way to get her back this shows that even though there is no way that the speaker can go back in time to her youth she still longs for it. Her desire to reminisce about the past has led her to realize that the child has drowned and will now never be recovered. Instead “an old woman rises toward her day after day,” this is the frustrating inevitability of fading beauty and old age. I think that this poem is a suggestion of the impending death that awaits everyone and Plath’s fear of it.
In “Bluebeard” every line rhymes as the poem is fairly short and there are either seven, eight or nine syllables in each line and every other line there is enjambement. The effect of this is it makes the poem more dramatic as it is so short it helps the reader to fully absorb what Plath is trying to convey and forces the reader to reread the poem and analyse it, for example when she states that she is sending back the key it makes you wonder why she is sending back the key. She is rejecting Bluebeard, she has the choice and she doesn’t want him. This is her opening line which makes her sound sure of herself as if she has made up her mind, however as she repeats “I am sending back the key” it makes you wonder whether she is actually sure of herself and is she just repeating this to try and convince herself that this is what she wants? Even though the poem is short it makes you re read it in order to find an alternate meaning. In “Mirror” there is no continuous rhythm or rhyme scheme which makes the poem seem more serious as it forces the reader to sympathise with the woman in the poem and consider the implications of old age. In “The Arrival of The Bee Box” there are seven stanzas with five lines in each and a single line at the end. The last line is a concluding thought that reflects on the outcome of the speakers thoughts in the poems, it is definitive and final. The many stanzas allow Sylvia Plath to change the speaker’s mood and thoughts in each stanza. This, along with the language used which is awkward and difficult to read, has the desired effect of reflecting her feelings of confusion. She seems to be trapped between her feelings of obsession and fear of the box she knows she can not open. This is similar to the myth of Pandora’s Box where the woman knows she can’t open the box as there is danger in it and yet is somehow strangely drawn to it
In general Sylvia Plath is successful in her endeavour to portray the fears of others in her poems. She is very skilful at writing about real feeling and involving her life in her poems to help incorporate real life situations into them. And by involving her fears into the poems this helps many people to relate to them.