Themes In Sylvia Sylviah's Mirror By Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath had a troubled life. She tried to commit suicide once, but failed. She ended up marrying and having two kids, but the marriage ended in divorce. She later tried to commit suicide again, this time she succeeded. As seen in the poem Mirror, if we aren’t content with our reflection or focus too much on finding ourselves through the mirror, we will end up losing ourselves and never find happiness, just like Plath. We need to find ourselves without looking in the mirror, because if we search for ourselves in the mirror, we will actually end up losing ourselves.
The first item the readers should consider in the poem is the title. The title of the poem is a major factor the reader should consider when reading this poem. The title of the poem helps the reader understand the speaker of the poem and helps portray the theme of the poem. The title tells us who the speaker of the …show more content…
Plath struggled with loving herself and that shows through her poem Mirror. Plath wasn’t pleased with what she saw in her reflection, therefore she lost her innocence. In her poem, she is trying to spread the message to love yourself and not to focus too much on the reflection in the mirror. Plath expresses the theme through her controlling images. She uses the idea of a lake to connect the idea of drowning the little girl inside of us and letting the old woman rise like a “terrible fish”. The image of the lake helps us visualize our youth and innocence drowning and the judgement rising. The old woman is a representation of the judgement we all put on ourselves when our reflection isn’t what we want. The “terrible fish” connects the image of an ugly fish to our judgement on ourselves. This puts the image in our heads of the judgement being ugly. The fish also helps the second stanza wrap up by bringing back the lake image. Plath had a rough life and that shows through her poem