Scott Maxwell-king

Comparisons of “I look into my glass” and “mirror”.

   I have compared the two poems “Mirror” by Sylvia Plath and “I look into my glass” by Thomas Hardy. I believe “Mirror” is about a mirror describing an old woman’s reflection, she can’t accept they way that she looks “whatever I see I swallow immediately” and is sad. “I look into my glass” is about an old man who looks at himself and believes he is dieing, he knows he has grown old.

   “Mirror” is about an old woman’s reflection and how the mirror thinks she looks unhappy and depressed. “In me she has drowned a young girl,” here she says her young self has drowned, which implies it’s died and only the old in her is left.

   Sylvia also says that the little girl who used to look into the mirror is gone and her old self rises to the mirror “like a terrible fish”. This shows how much Sylvia hates her self.

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   In the poem we get a sense of time like she has been sat looking at the mirror for a while as the poem says things like “over and over” and “day after day”.

 

  While reading “Mirror” the audience considers the mental state Sylvia was in when she split up with her husband, Ted Hughes and how she was on the edge from her father’s death as a child. This makes the reader believe that the poem is about Sylvia Plath’s life.

   I believe that the beginning of the poem describes Sylvia as ...

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The writer has not achieved an adequate understanding of either poem. Any essay on poetry needs to be clear about themes, tone and poetic techniques employed, and it is often a good idea to structure a comparison essay by developing a well-argued and substantial section on each of these areas, supporting the points made by appropriate quotation and textual evidence. Also, beware of viewing poems as wholly autobiographical. Even when poetry draws on the life and experience of the poet, the act of writing is always transformational and the poem which emerges is usually much more than a life history. *