The third analysis.
Mirror
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 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.
ANALYSIS
Sylvia Plath was born in
Boston, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932 and she had published her first poem
at the age of eight in the children’s section of Boston Herald. Plath had
depression and made in August 1953 her first medically documented attempt to
commit suicide. She took her mother’s sleeping pills and crawled under her
house where she remained for three days. Sylvia was sent in psychiatric care
for six months where she was given an electric shock and insulin treatment. On
February 11, 1963 Plath had finally committed suicide using her gas oven.
Sylvia Plath was one of the most renowned
and influential poets, novelist, and short story writers of the 20th
century. Plath wrote "Mirror" in 1961. In this poem, a mirror describes its existence
and its owner, who grows older as the mirror watches.
This poem is written in
free verse and contains two stanzas. The title is the main idea of the poem,
because the poem talks about the mirror itself. There is a personification of
the mirror.
In the first stanza,
the mirror reflects what is real. As you read it between the lines, it shows
how anyone can pass by it and just see the reality. The mirror has just a pink
wall in front of it. As the woman appears, the mirror changes itself slowly to
find out her fantasy, the woman sees that her reality is too hard to be dealt,
as the reality of any human being.
In the second stanza,
the mirror becomes a lake and shows what the woman wanted to see. The mirror
personified itself to a lake, something that reflects things in a beautiful
way, surrounded by nature.
The woman can see
herself during beautiful days of sunshine or maybe under the moonlight. It
doesn’t matter what she sees about herself at all. She sees her wishes, her
dreams, her goods and the mirror swallow them. The mirror has the woman’s life
for itself, and the woman gets terrified by her fantasy, as she grows older and
older and she is swallowed by the idea the mirror brings to her.
Lenonn Rosa
Wherdan Rech
