INTRODUCTION- ‘Mirror’ is a lyrical confessional poem written by Sylvia Plath a year prior to her death. She had written in the year 1961 but it was first published in 1971 by a London firm named Faber and Faber, eight years after her death. It was published as a part of a collection entitled ‘Crossing the Water’. It expresses the feelings of Sylvia Plath by an animated and personified mirror.
GENRE- The genre of confessional poetry came into being in the mid-twentieth century with the entry of Robert Lowell into the world of literature. It includes basically a class of poems which contain the personal experiences and emotions of the poet like death, trauma, depression, and relationships, expressed with skilled craftsmanship. Such matter had …show more content…
Here Plath simply expresses her raging depression due to her loss of beauty and aging. Though the speaker is the mirror, the subjects are the time and appearance. The woman struggles with her loss of beauty, admitting each day she is growing older. But she is not able to accept it fully, as she truth is bitter for her to accept being bound by the customs and definitions of the patriarchal society. Still the woman needs the mirror to give her an unbiased and true reflection of the self, even though it often hurts her bringing tears and resulting in agitation of hands. The most attractive feature of this poem is that in this poem Sylvia Plath is not only talking about just some random woman but also expressing her own story in yet clever ways. The mirror here is nothing else but the writer herself. She tries to look for the same self that she was long ago. She is observing her mind and soul whose image is reflected when she looks into herself. By seeing her true self, she knows about the distinction between her inner life as an artist and her outer life as any other woman in the society. In other words she might be meditating on the difference between a “false” outer self and “true” inner self. It is evident from the fact that Plath took suicide attempts many times; that she had many facets. Where she was polite and decorous to the outer world, her inner self was raging and explosively creative. A point to note here is that the mirror in the text straightforwardly describes itself. It feels compelled to bring out itself immediately. This gives a very faint picture of the aggressive and raging inner self of the writer. This poem describes the poet’s self while representing its own structure; this is down through the use of two stanzas containing nine lines each which are both symmetrical, serving different purposes for
GENRE- The genre of confessional poetry came into being in the mid-twentieth century with the entry of Robert Lowell into the world of literature. It includes basically a class of poems which contain the personal experiences and emotions of the poet like death, trauma, depression, and relationships, expressed with skilled craftsmanship. Such matter had …show more content…
Here Plath simply expresses her raging depression due to her loss of beauty and aging. Though the speaker is the mirror, the subjects are the time and appearance. The woman struggles with her loss of beauty, admitting each day she is growing older. But she is not able to accept it fully, as she truth is bitter for her to accept being bound by the customs and definitions of the patriarchal society. Still the woman needs the mirror to give her an unbiased and true reflection of the self, even though it often hurts her bringing tears and resulting in agitation of hands. The most attractive feature of this poem is that in this poem Sylvia Plath is not only talking about just some random woman but also expressing her own story in yet clever ways. The mirror here is nothing else but the writer herself. She tries to look for the same self that she was long ago. She is observing her mind and soul whose image is reflected when she looks into herself. By seeing her true self, she knows about the distinction between her inner life as an artist and her outer life as any other woman in the society. In other words she might be meditating on the difference between a “false” outer self and “true” inner self. It is evident from the fact that Plath took suicide attempts many times; that she had many facets. Where she was polite and decorous to the outer world, her inner self was raging and explosively creative. A point to note here is that the mirror in the text straightforwardly describes itself. It feels compelled to bring out itself immediately. This gives a very faint picture of the aggressive and raging inner self of the writer. This poem describes the poet’s self while representing its own structure; this is down through the use of two stanzas containing nine lines each which are both symmetrical, serving different purposes for