Question

meaning of poem mirror

Answer 1

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The poetess starts with the positive tenets of the mirror. The mirror is here delineated with some paramount virtues unimaginable to humans. The word “exact’ is impossible to us. We cannot achieve the state of ‘exact’ i.e. unchangeable. The mirror is said to have no pre-conception. The mirror is bereft of the human obligations of pre-thought. We tend to create an image about a person or things which bring partial and biased thinking. Whereas the mirror is free from these shortcomings and reflects flawlessly.

The poetess talks about the quality of the mirror in reflecting everything without any change. It reflects with supreme delicacy. Like humans it does not get affected by the human limitations like love or dislike

Truth is often hated. Often the very truth makes people feel sore and distressed. The mirror is here truthful and never misguides you. If we notice carefully, we shall find the virtues endowed to mirror are beyond the reach humans. The virtues like ‘exact’, “no preconceptions”, ‘unimisted’, “swallow immediately”, and ‘truthful’ can never be the tenets of human but these the can relate to ‘God’. Perhaps for this reason the mirror is described as ‘little god’

The word meditation takes us to more people those who are conceived as great. The mirror does not falter in her meditation. She does it spontaneously almost without any break. She looks at the opposite wall without any pause. The wall is of pink colour and having some spots.

These lines take us to the magic of power gaze. In power gaze we constantly look at something or any person and establish an invisible energy circuit between the two. You start to feel each other close and bearing the same tenets, feelings or emotion. The mirror gasing intently spontaneously enables it to possess the very characteristics of the wall.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over. The strong meditation of the mirror is often interrupted. Often faces of people and the darkness of night separate them.

Now the mirror is replaced by a lake. Lake has come perhaps to mean that both are having the same tenets. Only one possible addition can be made i.e. the lake has the depth. A woman bends over the lake to access her reflections. She is of the mind to check her true reflection. She expects herself look young and beautiful. But being truthful the mirror reflects the truth and reflects her with her lost beauty and youth.

As the reflection produced by the lake did not meet her expectation, she went to check the same to candles and the Moon. Candles and the moon are defined as liars as they are unable to provide any exact and true reflection. The candles and the moon provide the shadow or the dim light which does not affirm what she wanted. So the woman moves back to the lake and reacts with violent attitude. The woman cries and agitates as she discovers that she is no more young and beautiful and soon going to meet the horns of death.

Everything changes but the mirror does not change. The mirror is the witness of the changing of the woman. The memory of the woman is drowned (saved in the depth of time) in the mirror and the mirror is the witness of the woman’s turning into an old woman. The mirror watches the woman moving towards her end. And this makes the woman uneasy, wild and uncomfortable like the ‘terrible fish’. A fish taken out of water goes wild to save itself likewise the woman realising her lost beauty, youth and above all realising end near behaved like a terrible fish.

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Answer 2

Mirror is a short, two stanza poem, written in 1961. Sylvia Plath was living in England with her fellow poet and husband, Ted Hughes, and she had already given birth to their first child, Frieda.

This was a stressful time for Sylvia Plath. As a first-time mother she was on the way toward fulfilling her love for her partner but deep inside she dreaded the idea of ever growing old and settling down.

In a journal entry as a teenager she wrote : 'Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen. Every day is so precious I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older.'

And again: 'I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day - spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote.'

The poem is an exploration of this uncertain self and was probably influenced by the earlier poem of poet James Merrill, likewise titled Mirror.

Sylvia Plath's poem has her hallmark stamp of powerful language, sharp imagery and dark undertones. Together with unusual syntax, no obvious rhyme or meter and an astute use of enjambment, Mirror is a personification poem of great depth.