Daisy Atkin                IB1

English A1HL                Mr. John        

23/11/2007                511581

‘Mirror’

Sylvia Plath

Commentary by Daisy Atkin, IB1

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 a 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.

The poem ‘Mirror’, written by Sylvia Plath, is a clear story of how one comes to fear the onset of old age. Plath uses reflective devices – the mirror and the lake, to reflect and ponder upon future and past. Plath, having suffered abuse in childhood and allegedly also from Hughes’, her husband, uses the metaphorical mirror and lake to represent different personalities, and to represent herself going from child to adult. Although only 28 when she wrote this poem, she clearly feared old age, and saw it coming towards her faster than she liked.

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The first stanza clearly describes a mirror, and is told as it were, from the mirror’s point of view. The mirror reflects on what it sees, it reflects the truth of what it sees. This is shown in the line ‘I am not cruel, only truthful’. The mirror has been in the same place all its life and it ‘mediates on the opposite wall’. Then it is intercepted by a face, a face searching for something, time and time again. The face is constantly looking, searching for new signs of age approaching.

The mirror makes itself out ...

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