Analysis of "Mirrors" by Sylvia Plath

" 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. 

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 candles 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."

~Sylvia Plath

      Sylvia Plath, in her poem "Mirrors", embodies the relationship between one's inner and outer selves. The narrator is a personified mirror. The mirror understands and interprets what is sees. In the poem, a woman is obsessed with the image that the mirror reflects of her. She continually returns to the mirror to analyze her appearance. Later, the narrator becomes a lake. The lake, who unlike the mirror, has depth, can see through exterior facade and peer into her inner self. Through the woman's relationship with the mirror and the lake, Plath reveals the tension that exists between one's true inner self and the self that they falsely project to others.
         The poem begins with the mirrors describing itself as "silver and exact". The mirror wants to qualify itself as portraying a true image of what it reflects. The mirror doesn't  reflect what the viewer wants to see; instead it reflects what is actually there. It isn't "cruel, only truthful". However the mirror has more power than it acknowledges. The mirror is catoptric and shapes the light in a manner that the viewer can understand.  The mirror is facing a pink wall which implies that it is the part of the household used by the women. The poem was written during the beginning of the feminist movement. The poem possibly seeks to criticize the emphasis that women place on their exterior appearance. The mirror who claims to innocently reflect what it sees, shapes the lives of the women who use it and who's lives revolve around the image that it reflects. Habitually, the women return to the mirror to check upon their appearance. However, the outer self that the mirror reflects is only a facade that the woman hide their inner-selves underneath.
        In the next stanza, the narrator is a lake. Like the mirror, a woman uses the lake to look at her reflection. However the lake has depth and doesn't only reflect the woman's exterior appearance, but also allows her to see into her inner self. The lake allows her to see "what she really is". However the woman is upset with what the lake reveals. Each time she looks at herself in the lake, she sees her fleeting youth and youthful beauty. She cries because she is witnessing the loss of the beauty that she has emphasized throughout her whole life. However the woman also cries because the lake reveals something about her inner self that doesn't align with want she wants to be. She uses the candles and the moonlight to change her reflection in the mirror. However they are "liars" and only the mirror will "reflect it faithfully". The woman is saddened because she knows the lake reflects her true inner identity. As her outer beauty fades, the woman fears the day when the faults that the lake reveals in her inner self will manifest themselves in her outer self. In the last line, the woman is compared to a terrible fish, which is a personification of her transformation into an old woman.