Sylvia Plath: Poems Video

Video Transcript:

In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror,” the speaker is a wall mirror, which describes its existence and the woman reflected in it. The mirror claims it makes no moral judgments, but as the poem unfolds, it does observe and understand the woman as she grapples with the reality of aging. As speaker of the poem, the mirror is personified—that is, it is endowed with human traits. Moreover, the structure of the poem mimics its content: the poem is made up of two nine-line stanzas, creating a symmetrical doubling like a mirror and its subject.

In the first line of the poem, the mirror describes itself as “silver and exact.” It forms no judgments, but merely “swallows” what it sees and reflects that image back without alteration. The mirror claims that it is “not cruel, only truthful.” It considers itself a four-cornered eye of a god, which sees everything for what it is.

The mirror recognizes monotony. In the sixth and seventh lines, we find out it mostly “meditates” on the pink speckled wall across from it. It has looked at that wall for so long that it describes the wall as “part of my heart.” The pink wall is interrupted only by people’s faces and the darkness that comes with night. It is worth noting that by the end of the first stanza, the woman is still absent from the poem.

At the beginning of the second stanza, the mirror imagines itself as a lake. Now, the woman appears, trying to discern who she really is by gazing at her reflection. This image suggests the Narcissus story from Greek and Roman myth. In that story, a young man grows so transfixed with his own reflection in a pool that he drowns himself within it.

The woman struggles with the loss of her beauty. Sometimes, she prefers to look at herself in candlelight or moonlight, but these are “liars” because they mask her true appearance. Only the mirror gives her a faithful representation of herself, even as it causes her "tears and an agitation of hands."

Although the mirror agitates the woman, she cannot refrain from visiting it every morning. Over the years, the woman has “drowned a young girl” in the mirror—just as the young boy Narcissus drowns himself in the pool. But in this poem, the woman now sees in her reflection an old woman growing older by the day. The woman faces the distinction between what seems like a "false" exterior self and a "true" inner self.

In the last line of the poem, the old woman rises out of the mirror like “a terrible fish,” an image which may represent that unavoidable, darker self that cannot help but challenge the socially acceptable self.

By the end of the poem, we have the sense that the woman and the mirror are in some ways mutually dependent on one another. Despite the mirror’s initial claims to objectivity, the mirror, as the speaker of the poem, interprets the world once the woman appears, holding more power than it claims. The world of the woman and the mirror becomes more emotional, unsettled, and complicated.