poem analysis?

Question

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.

Sylvia Plath

Answer 1

simply means you don't want to do your own homework.

Answer 2

first part might mean the sensory world that a person perceives, exact, truthful but not deep yet. The meanings only flicker on a wall similar with the wall that has shadows from Plato's cave.

the second part might mean the conscious state
The mirror and the person are the same thing and the fact that the woman bends over a lake reminds of a theme in literature associated with Narcissus. The back might be the subconscious.
The moon can be the dreams and the candles, the superstitions. The feelings( tears) and emotions(agitation of hands), acting more uncontrolled than pertaining to conscious state, add richness and sensitivity( the reward).

Answer 3

The poem is called "Mirror". The two stories are about the author's idea of the reflections coming back from 1) a vanity in an empty candle-lit house and 2) a woman's reflection as she washes up in the lake each early morning.

Answer 4

OK, this poem and this question will allow me to say something about Plath, feminism, and psycho-analytic "literary criticism".

In the 1940's, 50's and 60's as the women's movement was beginning to come to fruition, it was determined by the leaders of that group that they needed a female, American, contemporary "Feminist Author". Someone who embodied the oppression of women in society, and expressed that oppression in her work.

For reasons that have always eluded an old fashioned guy like me, we were all presented with Sylvia Plath. Why the Women's Rights Poobahs would chose such an immensely self-absorbed, psychotic, neurotic, suicidal writer whose works were largely unreadable and impenetrable to "formal" analysis was, and remains, beyond me-----unless, of course, that was the point ("See what you men have done to this poor woman who had such promise...yad yada yada).

When it became clear that the vast majority or her poetry made no sense on a formal level at all, we were then told by the Feminist Intelligentsia that something called "psychoanalytic criticism" was the only way to read Plath, and that it was there that the meanings of her poetry became clear. The preferred analyses were either Freudian or Jungian. Using either technique, it is said that we can see how Plath's father was the source of her many and varied psycho/social deficits, that the image of "clouds" in her work was meant to convey oppression, etc. In short, we were told that through this new technique, Plath's indecipherable whining would make sense.

So, I guess we were supposed to buy into the proposition that whether she knew it or not on a conscious level, and whether her writings made any sense on a formal critical level, there was meaning there, almost in spite of herself, when one looked at it from a pyschological frame of reference.

Hmmmm. Think about that. If one views the creative process as an intentional thing, and if one views a poem, for example, as the result of conscious effort, then "psychoanalytic criticism" is a lot of nonesense. It might tell us something about Plath's own abnormal psyche, but it tells us nothing about her work, since the "good" parts of that are all subconscious anyway.

So, my view is that psychoanalytic criticism was/is an invention to try to salvage something from nothing. ALL of that having been said (phew!) this poem is one that does allow some formal analysis (although I bet the Freudians and the Jungians out there could have a field day with it----what's that fish at the end, for example)

There are two mirrors in this poem. An actual wall hanging mirror in part one, and the surface of the lake in part two. The mirror in part one tells it like it is, and most of the time simply relects the pink, speckled opposite wall which it has come to think of as it's heart (uh-oh here we go again). People walking in front of the far wall, or the darkness of night, make the mirror's heart flicker, and interrupt it's meditation.

In part two an older woman is, from time to time, reflected on the surface of a lake. She seems to be looking into the lake, beneath the surface, for answers. The lake feels superior to, and more important and truthful to the woman than "those liars" for whom the woman turns her back on the lake from time to time, only to become agitated. In the mornings, when the woman comes to wash, it is her face that "replaces the darkness", presumably at dawn....but Plath's getting tired here of the conscious creative effort.

I would argue that the last two lines are very difficult to come to grips with formally. I would also argue that the reason for this is that they are gibberish. Was there a murder? Will there be a suicide? Is the "young girl" really the older woman? To whom does the old woman rise every day---the lake or the young girl? What the heck is with the "terrible fish"?

While about as accessible as Plath's poetry gets, "The Mirror" is just another tease by a two bit, very psycho, author who, for reasons of literary political expediency, we're all supposed to believe is Poetry's version of the Second Coming. Bah, Humbug!

Answer 5

Plath uses the mirror as a symbol of herself. Yet, in the second stanza she describes a woman who looks into the mirror/lake. I also believe that this is her. One refers to her sane state of mental health (the mirror) and the other refers to the insane person within Plath. She describeds herself as "silver"(I believe this is a play on Sylvia) "and exact" meaning that she is a normal being with no disturbed thoughts or uncontrolled emotions.

Get more from these folks
http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/mirror.html

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Answer 6

Are you talk about Mam? Are you...?