Mirror

The poem is told in the first-person perspective, opening with the pronoun “I” and two short, standalone sentences. This introduces not only the mirror as speaker but the speaker’s distinctive voice. The words are simple and stripped of ornamentation in the same way that the speaker proposes to reflect the world. From the second line, it becomes clear that the mirror has an enveloping power: “Whatever I see I swallow immediately” (Line 2), bringing to mind an ancient being devouring a sacrifice. Though the speaker insists that they are “not cruel, only truthful” (Line 4), this image continues when the mirror professes itself to be “The eye of a little god” (Line 5).

There are two meanings to this distinct choice of words: in one respect, “god” refers to the mirror’s omnipotence and its ability to see all things exactly as they are, unfiltered through the cloudy lens of human emotion; in the other, the mirror recognizes its divine power over those who look upon it. This foreshadows the second stanza, in which there is a clear sense of worship between the mirror and the woman introduced in the second stanza.

In spite of the mirror’s all-seeing eye, its world in the first stanza is small and limited to a girl’s bedroom. The mirror watches the opposite wall and sees itself as an extension of the wall. Yet the mirror speaks of being separated from the wall by indistinct faces and shapes—there is a wistful, lovelorn quality to these closing lines that suggest the mirror needs something to reflect in order to feel whole.

In the second stanza, the small bedroom mirror becomes a large body of water in an open space. Despite the change in shape and setting, however, this is the same mirror, this time as a metaphorical lake, rather than two separate speakers. This suggests that the mirror has grown alongside the woman, each expanding into a larger world than the bedroom they once shared. While in the first stanza the girl didn’t give the mirror much of her attention (shown in the way a blank wall was the mirror’s most constant vision), the woman the girl has become is obsessively attached to the mirror. She is no longer satisfied with the image reflected back at her and instead attempts to find “what she really is” (Line 11). This suggests a divide between the surface-level version of the woman and the true self.

The woman vacillates between more flattering light that shows her body in a pleasing way and the mirror she knows to be a reflection of the truth. However, the disconnect between the truth from without and what she knows to be true within leads her into obsessive anguish. The image of the woman trapped at the water’s edge, seeking out her reflection day after day, is a feminine inversion of the Greek myth of Narcissus. In this story, a vain man became so besotted with his reflection that he stayed at the waterside until he wasted away. In Plath’s version, the woman is bound not by vanity but by her own insecurities and fears.

In the pivotal final lines, the poem veers away from its stark, unadorned language and closes with a metaphorical image of drowned youth and the woman’s impending aging. This is most often thought to refer to the journey from childhood to old age, and the inevitability of aging as the woman’s reflection grows older each morning. However, it has also been suggested that the fish may represent the deeper, less socially accepted parts of the self that are so often keep hidden—or, in Jungian terms, the shadow self. In this perspective, the drowned girl becomes not lost youth but lost innocence, and the fish the emergence of a wilder, more uncontrollable, and potentially dangerous state of being.