Mirror

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1963

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

This poem is written in two uniform nine-line stanzas for a total of 18 lines each. The stanzas are visually very similar, creating the impression of mirror images. Each line uses crisp, unadorned language that speaks directly to the reader, which enhances the poem’s message of a speaker who claims to have “no preconceptions” (Line 1) and reflects the world without ornamentation. The word choices are unfiltered and precise. The poem is written in free verse, which means it has no set structure or meter. Instead it creates its own form, which highlights the overall impressions of the narrative.

“Mirror” does not use traditional rhyming lines. It incorporates a few key near-rhymes or slant rhymes to heighten the poem’s sense of rhythm. For example, “[w]hatever I see I swallow immediately” (Line 2) uses similar sounds in “see” and “immediately.” Another slant rhyme happens in the words “cruel” and “truthful”: “I am not cruel, only truthful” (Line 4). These internal rhyming sounds create an impression of small reflections scattered throughout the poem, while still retaining the stripped-down quality that mimics the mirror’s unfiltered view of the world.

Personification

The entire poem is an example of personification, a literary device in which a non-human or inanimate entity is attributed with human thoughts and feelings. The narrative is told from the point of view of a mirror, an impersonal object that does not literally think or feel; in Plath’s poem, however, the mirror is capable of observation and personal connection.

In the first stanza, the mirror begins as a more objective observer—“silver and exact” (Line 1), “unmisted by love or dislike” (Line 3)—and slowly moves into something closer to humanity: “I meditate” (Line 6), “I think it is part of my heart” (Line 8). This is the moment that suggests the mirror, which dispassionately watches the world around it, may have an agency and desire of its own.

In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker personifies the candle and the moon as “liars” (Line 12). Here the literary device is used in two different ways; the poem attributes the quality of lying to the candles and the moon, even though in reality each is just as impersonal as the mirror is. This moment also ascribes a sense of judgment to the speaker, the mirror; it sees itself as more honest and authentic than these interlopers, thereby illustrating a confident sense of self—an ironic juxtaposition to the woman who comes to the mirror each day.

Simile and Metaphor

The poem uses metaphors and similes to enhance the overall theme and heighten pivotal ideas within the narrative. In the first stanza, the speaker describes themself as “[t]he eye of a little god” (Line 5). This refers not only to their ability to see everything in its purest and most honest form, but also the sense of worship the girl feels for the mirror. Like a divine entity, the mirror has become the focal point of the girl’s thoughts and energy. This idea presents a view on religion that is cold and impersonal, like the mirror’s relationship with the girl who comes to worship at it.

The second stanza closes with the pivotal simile that defines the poem: “an old woman / Rises […] like a terrible fish” (Lines 17-18). Here the fish represents the threat of old age, which begins as something murky and distant but draws inevitably ever closer. The mention of drowning—“In me she has drowned a young girl” (Line 17)—is also a metaphorical action; though the woman is not literally drowning someone in the water, the line refers to the way the image of the young girl is slowly sinking away to be replaced by the “fish” (Line 18) of maturity. Here the poem sheds some of its earlier streamlined objectivity and becomes more traditionally poetic, alluding to the complex and nonlinear emotions of leaving youth behind.