The Poem Mirror Annotated

The water is symbolic of romantic love as an overwhelming and transforming force that changes in form and changes the people involved. The wave is large, unpredictable and spans out as far as the eye can see. The movement of an all-encompassing emotion like love is impossible to contain, much like water. It is free flowing and goes on forever. “Love was a game, a perpetual creation (Paz, 2). Love and water are both creations of the divine and humans tend to use and abuse them. However, humans are emotional and social animals who need both love and water to survive. Waves have a way of hitting humans all at once, just like love. It renders humans excited and full of surprise at first “wave of surprise” (Paz, 2) like a crashing delight. It also leaves us always wanting more. We have an unquenchable thirst for love and affection, thus we chase it even in its most sinister forms, like an abusive relationship. The narrator is accepting of the wave 's presence when she appears in his home where he was once hesitant of the idea of her in his life. Love also transforms and can change us, like water changes states. It can become overwhelming and hard to breathe, but it is often all around us and

In stanza four, “there is still some water left over” alludes that the friendship of the persona and their company will endure and the strength of it will be enough to “refresh them”, even though their time is limited. Harwood comments on the use of the water motif in “Lamplit presences”; “In “At Mornington”, elements of the past, present and future are used in images of water…the first source of the flux of life: the water of the infinity of death”. The concept of the water motif alludes to the ________ of death and rebirth, and of the transitional stages of life. At the beginning of the poem, water represents the innocence of childhood, toying with the childish belief that life is infinite, displaying the persona as a child being saved by her father and tossed amongst the waves; “…and was caught by a wave and rolled/ like a doll among rattling shells/ and I seem to remember my father/ fully clothed, still streaming of water/half comforting, half angry”. Towards the end of the poem, the water is seen as a method of redemption and death, depicting the persona introspectively alluding to their acceptance of death; “…and when I am seized at last/ and rolled in one grinding race/ of dreams, pain, memories, love and grief/ from which no hand will save me…” This central motif of water, and its

Nonfiction is a genre of writing in which the author reflects on actual events in history. Lucy Grealy writes about an intense part of her life in a memoir. A memoir is written by the person it is about, usually written on the topic of something the author did or witnessed. Throughout this book, the author gives off vivid imagery and themes in order to help us understand just how difficult her life was. For example, in chapter 12, “Mirrors” on pages 207 to 208, Lucy describes just how a man loving her could change her view on life. Imagery, diction and setting also help to bring Lucy’s memoir together. Although this section seems to be about Lucy finding love, it is actually about the search and acceptance of self-identity as we can see from

I have learned a variety of information and knowledge about difference from the article, A Different Mirror. I have discovered more history of multicultural America which I virtually was not much knowledgeable about. Many different set of Americans were treated differently and encountered greatly distinctive experiences during centuries. The article provides a factual and concrete origins of the America of nationalists far as the Mexican Americans, Japanese America, Native Indians of America, African American, Chinse America, Irish America, and a host of other ethnicities of America. By the article addressing diverse stories of different groups, it opened my eyes in terms of learning the history of America itself, how society perceive particular

The first stanza of “Mirror” starts off extremely straightforward and detached from any emotion. The speaker says, ”I am silver and exact.”(1) “I have no preconceptions”(1). These first

Mirrors is about the way someone is feeling about life, themselves, and just trying their hardest to find some way to genuinely care about themselves after they lose themselves, and taking care of themselves even more than before, even if they are alone.

Mirror is the first poem of the four we will talk about. She is a woman poet in the 20th century. She has a lot of pressure with writing. Who is the speaker in the story? It’s her, herself. Mirror reflects on everything it sees. When we look in the mirror, what are we looking for? Or hoping to see? We are judged every day by so many people. So we care about how we look and we want to present ourselves nicely. That is her point in the poem. She had courage

     The mirror in the poem is a representation of the truths in life that as a person is difficult to come to terms with in one's self. The woman's view of herself and her reluctance to accept her natural and God-given beauty, shows how we all (as a society or as an individual) find it hard to accept ourselves for who we truly are. How we try to make ourselves into a conformed object of "popular beauty" based upon our outward appearance, instead of going by how our personal feelings that come from within us.

The poem is written in the first person with a confidential tone resembling confessional poetry, as also evidenced by the title, in which the word “mad” reveals a profound and totalitarian love to the point of obfuscating one’s mind. The mastery of the author emerges from the terzain of the first stanza, which contains the two refrains that are repeated throughout the poem and set its foundations. In only three short lines Plath encloses the concept of life and death, in a dance between sensory and visual perception, expressing the eternal dilemma that sees in contraposition what is visible through the physical eyes (somehow mechanical) and what can only be perceived at the sensorial level and therefore can be a mere figment of one’s imagination.

The mirror is a wisely chosen symbol that stands for the objective representation of the truth. As Plath mentions:" I have no preconceptions…I am not cruel, only truthful." In fact, the mirror reflects the author's subconsciousness, which is freed by the purity and truthfulness the mirror. The mirror has no magic power in it, but simply portrays the reality to those who use it. "It swallows" the true image just the

By the end of the poem, there is a shift. The housewife transforms into a “driver” (15) of her own life. The use of figurative language is intended to focus on the drastic change a woman undergoes. The act of driving has been exclusive to man, now a woman can drive i.e. she can write against the canonical arena. Driving epitomizes how she strives to “[learn] the last bright routes” and become a real “survivor” (17). Sexton is detaching herself from the patriarchal authority the day she finds refuge in writing. An identity of a mother or a housewife has to contrast with the conformity to the conventional roles of the domestic rituals. A woman has to move beyond the stereotypes, society imposes on her, for the sake of safeguarding her family. If Sexton is unashamed of being an iron woman, life bestows her success. She sabotages the conventional norms, subverts gender stereotypes and calls for the rights of women who are “her kind” (21) to transcend the sordid aspect of patriarchy. Now, she “[is] going to show them [her] sexts! (Cixous 885). The same imagery is provided by Sylvia Plath who, in her poem “Mirror,” reflects the female ongoing defeat of a distorted domestic happiness. The call for liberating the housewife from the domestic sphere better pins down Plath’s reformulation of the female identity away from “the patriarchal perception of [her] existence” (Ghasemi 58). Once she delves “through a violent transformation of her

I owe a great deal to many people, for their kindness and wisdom and putting me right. But to some I owe even more. Chief amongst these is my wife, Judy ; my daughter and her husband, Rachel and Jonathan. I will also mention Jan and Ian Bramley, David Ison and two college friends, Barry and Spike. All of these deserve more thanks than I am able to conceive.

Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror” is about a woman who gets older as the mirror watches her. At first, the mirror is “silver and exact” (1). The mirror does not judge; however, it swallows what it sees and reflects that image back (2). The mirror is also “not cruel, only truthful” (4), and considers itself a four-cornered eye of a god (5). Therefore, the mirror sees everything for what it is, and does not lie. The mirror looks across the empty room most of the time (6) and meditates on the pink speckled wall across from it (7). The mirror is attached to the wall, and has looked at that wall for so long, that the wall is thought to be “part of my heart” (8). The darkness in the room and the people who consider the mirror are the faces and darkness that separate the woman and the mirror (9). In the next stanza, the mirror is now portraying itself as a lake (10). A woman is looking into the lake (10), and she is

One literary technique that Plath utilizes frequently in her poems is motifs; with certain topics appearing consistently in her poems: feet, nature, death, and, in particular, mirrors. Entitled “Mirror,” this poem personifies a mirror, and what it experiences through its own “eyes.” The mirror begins by describing its physical appearance as “silver and exact,” and how it has “no preconceptions,” the mirror is emphasizing the fact that when looking at one’s physical appearance in the mirror, in this case the lady character in the poem, that the mirror gives the entire truth of how a person actually appears. The mirror is not willing to alter the image of an individual because it is not the truth. It is often perceived that the mirror is being “cruel” because the “woman” is not always pleased when seeing her reflection, the mirror is the voice of honesty in this poem and it is only being “truthful” to the woman about her appearance. Later in the poem, the mirror becomes a lake, and this time when the woman is looking at her reflection, I believe that she is looking at more than just her physical reflection; she is searching for her inner-self. I do not believe that the woman will be able to find her “true self” through the reflection of the lake because the water is able to shape in all directions; in essence, the lady could shape her own perception of her “true self” - just as water can be shaped. The poem also mentions that the woman “turns to those liars, the candles or the moon,” it is evident through this line to identify that the woman is clearly using the “candle” and the “moon” to alter her “true” appearance. The woman in the end comes back to the mirror because she knows that it will always be honest with her. Although the woman comes to the conclusion that she values the truth, I at first perceived her as crazy for using a “candle” in order to make her appear more attractive, but this can be very relatable in today’s society. I realized that everyday I am also a victim of altering my appearance in a mirror as well; when taking a

I have always been interested in systems and structures. As a child I enjoyed the challenge of writing poetry, the intense structures mirrored in sentence fragments and the chaos of words. Somewhere along the way this semester I remember listening in on a conversation about rhyming words, we are obsessed with rhyming. As a lover of poetry I began to ponder why we love rhyming words so much, my conclusion is that it gives a through line of sound in a chaotic language. Education is much like poetry, it finds itself grounded in structure but there are little nuances along the way that allow chaos to form, shifting the ideal into reality. As said by John Dewey in 1916 in Democracy and Education, “ … there is a kind of passivity, willingness to let experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen which is essential of development… we are all instructors to realize that quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth…” (Allen, 2011, p.30). If my brain was a filing cabinet at the start of the semester everything I thought it knew got thrown on the floor, as time passed and I organised my thoughts new documents began to find their way into the piles, changing the system that was previously created. Growth, reflection and perception have dominated my thought processes this semester, the through line is assessment. Assessment regarding learning but also assessment as reflection of thought, convergent, divergent and lateral modes of thinking. The three modes of thinking are as follows described in teachthought.com, convergent being logical and critical thinking, Divergent being imaginative and creative thinking and lastly, lateral being both convergent and divergent in balance with each other equalling thinking outside the box (Staff, 2017). When reflecting on my semester it is important to me to consider all areas of growth in my journey. From the flow of chaos in the classroom to the filing cabinet that holds all my theory and the mode of thought that I approach my daily activities with.