Sylvia Plath Mirror Analysis

Elle Spears

Mr. McCabe

English 2H/6

17 September, 2014

Mirror-Analysis

        In Sylvia Plath’s contemporary American poem “Mirror,” a young depressed woman looks into a skewed reality which distorts her vision of herself into a hideous and repulsive old woman, when really she is a gorgeous, strong young woman.

        The speaker of the poem is the personified mirror, and its audience is the appearance of Plath, throughout her daily routine. The occasion is that Plath is mentally disturbed, bipolar, and has a skytsotypal personality disorder. The time that the poem is placed in would be around the early 1960’s. The setting takes place in one of Plath’s rooms inside her home.

        The central purpose of the poem is to explain how Plath views herself. “Searching my reaches for what she really is” is a connotation to looking at her reflection. “I am silver and exact” is an example of imagery in the poem. Another example of imagery is “It is pink, with speckles.” The function of the personification in the poem is to bring to life the mirror which is the speaker. The purpose of a simile in the poem is to compare her reflection to a fish, for instance “In me she has drown a young girl, and in me an old woman rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” Honestly the mirror is just and truthful in what it reflects back to Plath, so it was just Plath that was disfiguring her own image through her own thoughts and prejudice on herself.

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