SYLVIA PLATH

Mirror

EARLY YEARS

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932.

In 1940, her father died as a result of

complications from diabetes when she was only eight

years old. As a result, his strictness and death

defined her poems and her relationships.

She started a journal at age eleven and published

her poems in regional newspapers and magazines.

COLLEGE

She attended Smith College where she was an

exceptional student, but in 1953 she left a note

saying she was going for a walk. She took a blanket,

a bottle of sleeping bills and water to the cellar and

fell unconscious. Her mother only waited a few hours

to phone the police and she was found the next day.

MARRIAGE AND DEATH

After graduating from Smith College, she went to Cambridge

on a Fulbright Scholarship where she met Ted Hughes. They

married a few months later.

In 1960, her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published.

After Ted left Plath in 1962, she fell into a deep depression. In

1963 she published an autobiography under Vitoria Lucas.

On February 11, 1963, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs

neighbor and then committed suicide using her gas oven.

BACKGROUND OF THE POEM

Sylvia Plath wrote the poem, Mirror, in 1961. It

was published by Faber and Faber eight years after

her death as part of the collection Crossing the

Water.

CONTINUED BACKGROUND

Point of View: First Person

Speaker: The mirror/lake

Type: Free Verse

THEME

Pain comes with losing ones innocence and youth

because society values beauty and youthfulness

more than the truth.

FIRST STANZA

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.

SECOND STANZA

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 candle 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.