Literary Analysis Of Mirror By Sylvia Plath

Doesn’t everyone wish they could grow up faster when they are younger, but when they actually start to grow up, they just want it to slow down? Aging is a unique experience to everyone and each person deals with it differently. This theme of aging and how people see themselves can be seen both similarly and differently in “Mirror” by Sylvia Plath and “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. These similarities and differences can be seen through each author’s tone, each poem’s structure, and each poem’s overall message.

Plath uses an intriguing personification to start off her poem as the mirror speaks as a human saying “I am a silver” and “I have no preconception”. A first person narrator as if the mirror is an object that express thing from an honest observation. The stanza demonstrates the goal of the mirror from the way it described itself. The objectivity of the mirror is even more accentuated in the second line when the poet writes “whatever I see I swallow immediately”. (Plath 2) Human qualities are also given to the mirror when it says “on the opposite wall, it is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is part of my

In “Mirror” by Sylvia Plath, the speaker is represented as a mirror that reflects the life and actions of another human being. The speaker develops a casually detached tone right from the beginning of the poem, but also portrays an accepting mood by the end of the work. These tones and moods are expressed through the use of diction, punctuation, metaphors, and imagery. The tone of this poem fluctuates and makes it difficult for the reader to grasp the emotions of the speaker due to the fact that it is a very short piece.

Eileen M. Aird analyzes and comments, “The danger of such criticism lies in its assumption that the poem is objectively ‘true’, that it bears a precise relationship to the facts of the poet’s life.” The direct criticism Plath puts upon her father is very crucial, yet evidently true if one was research her life. Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical poetry can be easily connected to her life and the answers to the many questions are easier to uncover than one may suspect. As her poetry developed, it became more autobiographical and although through her teenage years she possessed what seemed to be a rounded personality, the anguish and grief of her father’s death was easily linked with her mental instability that haunted her in the later years.

Plath’s main influences were behind other important people in her life and major events that affected her life. Towards the ending portion of Plath's career her poems became more about her personal life, especially nature and also a huge negative experience that impacted her life such as her divorce to another poet Ted Hughes. Nature played a big part of her inspiration in her poems especially after she married her husband Ted Hughes and moved to New York. New York is where she wrote most of her nature inspired poems such as “Dark Wood, Dark Water” . In “Dark Wood, Dark Water” Plath vividly describes nature with many uses of imagery such as a lake thick with fish”. Another event that had a influence was her divorce. She had first met her husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes at a party, since then they hit it off, he helped her gain most of her poetic voice and they both influenced each others poems. So when they divorced it mainly played a part in her late career of poetry and also a key of tone in her poems. In her poem “Ariel” Plath describes some of her feeling and depression she had after she got a divorce to her husband Ted Hughes. For example some lines that described her depression were “And I Am the arrow, the dew that flies, suicidal, at one with the drive into the red eye.” Not only did these events influence her but also other key people were part of her inspiration of Plath’s

Sylvia Plath, Judith Right and Emily Dickinson all express through their poetry the diverse feelings and beliefs they have in regards to life and death. Throughout Plath’s poems it is evident that she resents life and obsesses over the purity and perfection that she associates with death. Contrastingly, Wright demonstrates through her poems how she accepts the cycle of life, and embraces the gifts and challenges that it holds. Then, unlike Plath and Wright, Dickinson regards death and the afterlife with uncertainty and she portrays through her poetry the curiosity she has for life after death and the secrets it holds. These poets all use the similar technique of imagery to express the intense emotions they associate with both life and death. Furthermore, throughout the poems by Dickinson, Plath and Wright it is evident that each employ language techniques to portray their diverse beliefs and emotions regarding life and death. Finally, all three poets employ structure to illustrate the depth to which they regard life and death and the power each holds.

Poetry lives in spaces where ordinary language cannot do the work, it finds a way to survive through intros in rap songs, commercials or ads, and monologues in movies. Poetry depicts the emotions nobody dares to talk about in public and shows how much a situations can impact you. These events create emotions into art. Sylvia Plath’s story and motive to write poems begins around the same time her father passes, an event that will impact her poetry deeply. A little after Plath’s eighth birthday her father dies from a case of diabetes that he ignores to treat. Plath published one of her first poems at the early age of eight in the children’s section of the Boston Herald. Later, in 1950, she is accepted by Smith College, where she meets an

In the first poem Mirror, written by Sylvia Plath, a clear message is presented. Growing old is inevitable. Laura Hutchinson states, “I think it's the fact that if life has taught us anything, it's that things get harder as we get older.” The hardest part of getting older is accepting the fact that age is coming. Most people would rather stay in their youth, where they can run and all of their joints work well. But of course, that isn’t possible. Every second our body is aging and there is nothing that anyone can do to slow down the process. “In me she had drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish”(Lines 17-18). A mirror sees every aging process that a human goes through in their lifetime, they see the wrinkles form and the spots increase. But, what matters the most is how someone handles the aging they go through. It will be hard, but on the other hand, it will be fun. And that is truly all that matters.

Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Lady Lazarus”, was greatly about the author’s life: the influence by her suicide attempts, years of troubled mental health, and stressed relationships with her father and husband.

Throughout numerous works by Sylvia Plath, she is characteristically known for emphasizing conflict, whether it be within herself or in the world around her. This poem dramatizes the conflict between the craving a sense of belonging and feeling useless. To create this effect, the speaker refers eloquently to the notion that she feels bland and unnoticed in comparison to nature. She wishes to possess the same striking beauty that the flowers have in their beds, or the same sense of direction that the trees have within their secured roots. The speaker then attempts to relate herself to her environment but fails, knowing that she will continue to be overlooked even though she and the sky "are in open conversation" (l 18). Finally, after realizing that nature cannot be paralleled when compared, especially to her, she concludes that she is more useful when she is lying horizontally without a purpose, hence the first line. In this way, the speaker seems to imply that she would be more valuable if she was dead and used as fertilizer for those same flowers and trees.

In the poem “Mirror”, by Sylvia Plath, the message of self-image is displayed. Platt wrote this during a time when the views of women were rapidly changing. The reflection of a woman was very important and the feminist movement was beginning to make a bigger impact on the world. The poem shows the woman changing and getting old and what happens to the way women view themselves as they age. Diane von Furstenberg once said, “Aging is out of your control. It’s how you handle it is what matters.” This quote and the poem make the reader curious by seeing the next time they look in the mirror, do they like what they see? Clearly, “Mirror” displays the theme of self-image.

In the world of poetry, it is a commonly known fact that Sylvia Plath had a tendency to express her fascination with death and various other extremely dark, heavy, and morbid topics in a myriad of her works. The intensely personal and somewhat taboo topics that are found in her poems can sometimes be tremendously challenging for people to face, but Plath’s supreme writing ability allowed her to write about such subjects in a way that made readers unable to look away from the page. This idea is especially true in her persona poem “Lady Lazarus,” which deals with the morose matter of mental illness and suicide. In this poem, Plath has the speaker, Lady Lazarus, describe her previous and future experiences with death and resurrection. Lady Lazarus is unafraid of and seems to completely embrace death, almost to the point where she takes pleasure in it, and she abhors how her resurrection is made into a theatrical show and a science experiment. For most of the poem, themes of suffering and death are present, but as the poem nears the end, a more positive theme of empowerment arises. To express the speaker’s innermost feelings concerning suffering from oppression and depression, Plath utilizes unique form, unorthodox rhythm and rhyme, and unbelievably violent, gory, and horrific images of death associated with the treatment of Jewish people during the time of the Holocaust, and she does so, spectacularly.

The themes in the poem “Mirror” explore the loneliness, self-perception, and aging of the woman. The women in the poem is captivated with her own reflection. According to Path the women says, “I am important to her, she comes and goes” (Plath 15l). The mirror reflects a woman looking at herself, appraising her reflection. As the woman ages, she awaits on candlelight to cover her flaws. She battles with the absence of her beauty, accepting each day that she is not young and beautiful anymore. The "fish" in the poem represent that inescapable, darker self. Though the woman infrequently misguides herself with the favorable "liars" candlelight and moonlight, she constantly goes back to the mirror for the truth. In the article “The Monsters in Plath’s Mirror” by William Freedman, states that, “It is to look in the mirror and pretend one does not see the monster” (Freedman161). This shows the way that the woman tends to focus on the appearances that makes her a slave to her own reflection.

The poem “Mirror," by Sylvia Plath, was written in 1961. The poem takes place during a time when women's reflections were changing quickly, and women’s movement was becoming more important. According to Kristine Tucker in “The Overall Meaning of the Poem ‘Mirror,’” she states, “The ‘Mirror’ was written by Sylvia Plath in 1961 but wasn't published until 1971, eight years after her death by suicide.” Therefore, presuming the lady in the mirror is Plath, readers assume she wrote the poem referring to her personal life and her struggle with depression due to her appearance.

The first stanza of the poem personifies the mirror, describing the mirror itself as well as where it is located and what it sees. From the very beginning of the poem, we know who the speaker is. “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.”. Between the title of the poem and that opening description, we can infer that the speaker or “I” in the poem is in fact a mirror. Mirrors cannot lie to the person being reflected, they show the truth and only the truth. Nothing that the mirror reflects can differ, it shows what it sees without any “preconceptions”. The next line, “Whatever I see, I swallow immediately”, is also another way of saying that a mirror immediately reflects everything that comes into its line of sight. This is a great example of personification. By using the word swallow instead of reflect, the mirror becomes instantly more human like. The word “immediately” continues to hint at the honest and unchanged view that the mirror presents. “Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike” is acknowledgment to the fact that humans' judgements about people can be clouded by personal feelings of like or dislike towards the person. When a human feels love towards a person, their reflection or aura is automatically better than that of a person that the human may not like. The mirror does not let emotion distort the image that it