The most advanced language analysis I think I will ever do...

 

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.

Write a close critical analysis of Mirror, discussing the ways Plath presents time and identity in this poem and the collection as a whole. 

In 2017 Moore said that Mirror, a two-stanza poem written in free verse, is a “conflict between devastating truth and reassuring illusion,” however, I believe the poem tells us instead of a conflict between a devastating illusion and a reassuring truth. It presents the disturbing idea that our modern view of ageing, and of time, can have a destructive, consuming power upon us as humans: it can “drown” our true selves. Plath can be viewed as a ‘confessional poet’, the themes of loss and consumption, that emanate from this ‘drowning’, are as prominent in her work, including Mirror, as they were in her life. In Pursuit, Plath is ‘consumed’ by sexual desire for the “panther” stalking her down and in the rest of her life she is consumed by the tragic embrace of loss. The loss of her father (the “you” and its rhymes that pain almost every line of Daddy); the metaphorical loss of her own identity – the like of which is elegantly portrayed in Mirror - and finally our loss of an exceptional poet on the day she tragically committed suicide. From a young age, till that terrible day, a fascination with time, and its effects on people, perplexed Plath – she wrote in her journal at age 17, “somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen,”.   

In Mirror, Plath highlights the potentially devastating nature of time, that her younger self feared, when she portrays the pain that it can inflict upon us “day after day” with a semantic field of consumption. Plath presents the lady as having “drowned a young girl” in the “lake” of the mirror. This drowning metaphor gives the impression of sinking, of losing air which combined with the constant personification of the mirror “swallow immediately,” is used to suggest that the mirror, and its presentation of time passing, ‘eats away’ at people. 

Plath suggests these negative connotations of time are masculine, in the hedged oxymoronic phrase, “the eye of a little god,”. Using the word, “god”, presents the mirror as a male creator, this imagery portrays the idea that the mirror has the ability to construct our identities, therefore we can infer the god like power its “eye”, and that of man, has over the woman.  

Initially, Plath presents the mirror’s superiority as justifiable because of its veracity, exemplified by its use of short, overwhelming claims of objectivity, “I have no preconceptions,” and “I am… only truthful”. But already the positive characteristics the mirror claims are juxtaposed with ego, foreshadowing that the mirror is not as entirely objective a presenter as it likes to suggest. 

Predatory males in power feature in a selection of Plath’s poems, she is constantly grappling against the unjust hold they have upon society, and her.  She presents the mirror’s authority as not being deserved in an unmetrical Alexandrine esc line where the mirror states that the wall opposite is “part of my heart”. In this emotive phrase the rare use of internal perfect rhyme within the poem underlines the sense of connection the mirror feels towards the wall: it believes they are one and the same. This seems slightly naive – the mirror thinks it is only what it sees, it does not recognise the materials from which it is built. We can infer that the mirror sees only a two-dimensional world without full understanding. We realise that despite its quest for truth, what the mirror reflects as one critic put it, ‘is only skin deep,’ an indication that it does not show the true composition of the woman and that therefore it does not deserve the respect it lauds for. It was the revelation of this lack of substance which led to Narcissus, who had fallen in love with his own reflection, to commit suicide.  

The metaphorical phrase ‘Now I am a lake’, which starts the second stanza, continues the idea of lack of depth in judging people’s identities. It highlights the need to consider what lies beneath the surface. As the underwater life of a lake is hidden by the reflective surface, the inner human is obscured by the outer shell; but this is all that the mirror can show. That the woman is so upset by her own reflection that she “rewards” the mirror’s honesty with only an “agitation of hands”, infers that the mirror’s surface level presentation is not how she views herself. When she “reaches for what she really is” we get the impression that the woman knows there is more ‘underneath,’ but the Mirror makes it hard to find. This puts the mirror in conflict with the romanticism of the time. Romanticism embraced, even promoted, emotions and their links with aesthetic beauty. The mirror rejects this – its reference to its being “silver and exact” – a metal structure -signifies a connection back to the industrial era, of robotic workers seen as tools and not people. 

Perplexingly, Plath ends the lake metaphor, and the poem, with a jarring simile, “like a terrible fish”. It seems odd, due to the normally serious nature of Plath’s poetry, to end on this visceral imagery. It is combined with a shift from iambic to trochaic structure that doesn’t fit with the rhythm of the poem so far. Plath wishes we view the world from a less superficial standpoint. This shift, and this lucid simile, pull us away from the fiction in which we have been immersed. The incongruous ‘fish’ forces us out of our whimsical imagination and insights us to ask questions of ourselves. 

It is a common question that many critics have asked of literature, whether it should be a mirror to life, or an illuminating lamp, revealing essential truths. I would argue, ironically, that this poem is not a mirror, instead it shines a light on the identity of individuals beneath the skin, that time cannot consume. The poem suggests the authority of males, that don’t deserve the hierarchical superiority they garner in society, has created turmoil. It underlines the importance of understanding our own self-worth to look beyond a façade that challenges and weeps over the western view of the old woman. 

 

Bibliography: 

Guide to selected poems of sylvia plath ray moore 2017 

Ariel and … by sylvia plath 1960s 

SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY. LECTURES ON. HAMLET ac Bradley 1904 

Andrew spacey analysis of poem “mirror” by sylvia plath 2020