“Mirror”

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.

Notes

The mirror of the first line addresses the reader in the first person, it is personified, it has a personality. The mirror in Sleeping Beauty comes to mind immediately. Both mirrors tell the truth and both mirrors are interrogated by a woman about her beauty.

However, Plath's mirror's voice proceeds with altogether a different style from the "My Queen you are the fairest here so true. But SnowWhite is a thousand times more beautiful than you". Here sentences are short, the language draws from the realm of science (exact, preconceptions). One would not normally think to find such words in a poem. This mirror swallows what it sees immediately. Besides adding another humanising quality, this second verse adds the dimension of time: immediately.

One would tend to think that a mirror only reflects, but here Plath hints at the idea that the mirror steals the image of the person who is being reflected. Not the image which is being reflected in the present, but the past image, immediately gone by, even just by an instant. So the effect is that all past images are somehow stored in the mirror's depths. 

So the mirror has something like a stomach, an interior apparatus, an inner world which contrasts with the idea of a mere surface, a flat object only having two dimensions. It has a third dimension: depth. 

Depth is further emphasised by the use of "meditate" in line 6 which accounts for only one of the meaning of "reflect". "Reflect" means both throwing light back from a surface and pondering, meditating, considering, which are all human characteristics. But the mirror is more than human. Human beings are misted by love and desires, they fail in being objective, only a divinity can have such qualities.