In July, Sheela Miss was teaching us a poem by Sylvia Plath. It was titled "Mirror" (I'm sure our seniors know about it).This poem had a peculiarity in it. Although the poem is short (and somewhat "peripheral", as said by our teacher), I felt the poetess was dealing with topics related to infinity and the vast bonds that tie it to this world. Look inside the mirror, you see yourself. Look inside of yourself, what do you see? Exactly.
Here's the poem:
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 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.
This is my take on the poem:
A mirror is a rarely considered object. A necessity indeed, but often a neglected one. We overlook the amazing capabilities of a mirror to personify any character. Day after day we see ourselves through an inanimate entity, a very ordinary one too. In fact it would be ironical to say that god’s greatest creation can easily be emulated and personified by an object as lucid and plain as a mirror. If we consider the various possibilities that a mirror holds, we can find an insight in ourselves. Staring at the mirror in my room I saw a world, a parallel world, transfixed in it. I daresay that this world is a world of plagiarism, a world of duplicity, a world of imitation and mimicry, a world that defies the rational structure of our own, but is requisite to maintain it, nevertheless.
This is the insight I received of the mirror:
Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror”, is a delightful account of the insight she received, I feel. She uses her mental psyche to pervade the façade of a mirror, so that inevitably she reaches her trueself. In the poem, Plath refers to the mirror as devoid of preconceptions. She calls it “the eye of a little god” implying the non-subjective attribute of the mirror. The mirror, in the poem, denies vehemently that it is not what humans think of it; it is not cruel, just honest, and it understands what humans want, but never give them the pleasure. For the mirror adjudicatesnot just the outward appearances, it is an objective judge of a person’s true feeling. A person who can look at the mirror in the eye is void of blemishes. But such is the irony of the mirror; it is seldom noticed meticulously.
Finally, the poem ends with the brutality of the truth known by the mirror; old age is in close proximity to the observer. As said in the poem, each day a young woman is drowned in the depths of the murky lake concealed by the mirror, and each day, an old woman rises towards the observer like a terrible fish-an excellent metaphor suggesting the advancement of old age and the dying of youth in a woman.
This is an excellent poem to read and enjoy with deep and detailed understanding.
