Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
“Mirror” was written two years before Plath committed suicide in 1963. It appeared in Plath’s posthumously published collection Crossing the Water.
“Mirror” explores the life of a woman as an object reflected within it. The poem can be regarded as a retrospective investigation of the self through “...
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever you 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.
Sylvia Plath released Mirror on Sun Jan 01 1961.