Mirror by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is so famous I doubt she needs an introduction. Here's a poem of hers that I am simultaneously afraid of and in love with:

Mirror

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 the 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 a 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.

We've all had that moment when we look in the mirror and realize we do not like what we see. I don't believe self-image is any more or less of an issue than it was in 1961 when this was written; the mother of the fashionably anorexic herself, 60s supermodel Twiggy, came into vogue just five years after this poem was written. Still, body image is a very hot topic now. Everyone wants to enter into the "fat or thin" debate, people love to gossip about how thin Keira Knightley is, Barbie's changed her proportions--some celebrity is probably getting a nose job right now.

A few years ago when I was in Japan, I was flipping through a magazine aimed at teen girls when I saw an unusual ad featuring close-up pictures of young Japanese girls' eyes and before and after pictures. I went and asked my host sister what the ad said, and she explained to me that I was looking at an ad for double eyelid surgery.

I mention all of this to show just how much Sylvia Plath's poem has to do with every day of our lives. People go to great lengths to fix what the mirror shows them, but the poem suggests that we can never really fix it. There have been debates about whether the poem refers to literal aging in the last few lines or emotional aging or worsening depression (Sylvia Plath committed suicide two years after writing this poem), and I think both readings are important.

But is it possible learn from a poet who obviously didn't have all the answers? I think so. Plath's poem expresses the insecurity, fear, and even self-loathing that often dwells within our mirrors. As a poet, her job is only to illuminate--not to answer.