What I love about this poem is that it is so self explanatory, yet at the same time...it isn't. For instance, when I first read it, I got all of these really mystical-like visuals and colors in my mind, and I got the feel of the poem, but I didn't really know exactly what the heck she was LITERALLY talking about.
So she explains what her idea of a mirror is, trying to trick us by saying how "truthful" a mirror is, which is a lie. A mirror only reflects what you see yourself. (Also, the saying 'Smoke and mirrors' is common when talking about trickery.) She then goes on to give her idea of the life of a mirror. Pretty bland, I would assume, just hanging on a wall, looking at the adjacent wall all day till it seems like that wall is a part of you, until it gets dark and then it starts all over again when someone turns on the lights...however, can you think of a mirror that knows you better than anything, perhaps anyone? I think I can. Often, it's found in a room where you would most likely have pink wallpaper with speckles on it. It's a room we all try to make a little 'feminine' as the room itself has a rather icky connotation at times. Zee bathroom, of course.
"Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is."
This change is to throw us off. Though water is in essence a mirror, I think we as humans tend to romanticize water, whereas a mirror is rather sterile. But when you think about it--they both do the same thing. So, usually, we can find our own personal lake right below our little personal mirror in the bathroom. It's called zee sink. Each morning when we wake, we usually fill the sink with water to wash our faces or whatever. Viola--a lake.
So, the mirror is Plath and Plath is the woman. Each morning while she went to brush her teeth, wash her face, take a shower and all those other personal things we do in the bathroom, she noticed the mirror, but she also realized that the mirror only reflected her own point of view, that it was only truthful to her own eyes. Also, when most of us wake up, we're not exactly looking too great -- by our own standards, at least. We see our hair all messed up, those unwanted approaching wrinkles, we REALLY need to brush our teeth, maybe a pimple snuck up on us in the middle of the night...all these things we see when we first wake up--it's not really that pleasant. So we fill the sink with water, bend over the counter, dunk our hands in it, "search [its] reaches" and "agitate" it a bit to mix around the soap and splash our face with some water. Then, as our face nears the sink of water to rinse off, we notice this very odd image that seems to rise towards us in the sink -- a 'FISH eye' view of our morning face...how "terrible" is that?!
Plath had drowned her youth in the sink as we all have. Over the years, we dry our faces look into the mirror and see another day go by. It's kind of depressing. But in that same day, someone else will tell us how pretty we look today, so it all comes down to perspective with physical appearance. With poetry, I think it is easy for us to get carried away by passionate words. But it's all just to convey a message and most of all, a feeling.
I would really like to give more of my philosophical interpretation of "Mirror", but this post is long enough already. I think "Mirror" is a masterpiece...truthfully speaking.
bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies” this could be seen as how Plath sees her old age before she reaches the sudden end “From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me”.
To show a clear contrastbetween Plath and Heaney the next poem I shall study is Blackberry-Picking by Heaney. The poem begins in a very direct manner for Heaney sets the scenario, forcing in no rhythm, rhyme or second meanings “Late August, gives heavy rain and sun for a full week, the Blackberries would ripen”. Then instead of describing the whole scene, he isolates just one berry and talks of that “At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others red, green, hard as a knot”. This represents a good way of really relating across to the reader his exact thoughts thus producing a strong picture in the mind. He adds to this by sharing his own thoughts with the reader “You ate that fist one and its flesh was sweet”. He then starts on a more refined use of imagery by always relating his previous description with ones further down. This is noted when he talks of the “lust for Picking” for it is as a bloodlust would be to “summer’s blood”. The next clever uses of words after this comes a few lines down when he entwines compound words into his lines to create the feeling that they used everything they could “Sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots”. It is when the containers begin to fill that Heaney cleverly mixes the senses by using a sound descriptive word to talk of something he sees, “Until the tinkling of the bottom has been covered”, this represents a first use of onomatopoeia.
This is something I did not notice in Plath’s writing but what I did notice was her imagining the blackberries as eyes as Heaney does here “on top big dark blobs burned like a plate of eyes”. This may suggest a correlation in the writings but I shall talk more of this in my conclusion”. Thus I move to the last line of this verse there is another notable reference to blood “our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s”. This is the third reference to blood in this verse (the firs ...
