The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. But for Plath, the mirror doesn’t merely reflect: it somehow sees people, too. This is not some hall of mirrors at a fairground, which deliberately distorts faces and body shapes: whatever we see when we look in the mirror is what the mirror was accurately and faithfully ‘swallowed’. In summary, the mirror tells us that it has ‘no preconceptions’: it is ‘exact’, with the implication that it simply shows us what it ‘sees’. ![]() A poem, bordering on dramatic monologue, in which a mirror speaks to us, addressing the reader in a matter-of-fact tone, reflecting the flatness of its surface and its inability to do anything other than reflect back to us what it ‘sees’. In this short poem, she uses the image of a mirror at a party, throwing back at her the half-familiar sight of her own self, as a way of pondering the relationship between love and self-love. Jennings (1926-2001) deserves a wider readership than she currently enjoys. ![]() The shortest poem on this list, and a nice companion-piece to Plath’s.Įlizabeth Jennings, ‘ Mirrors’. Like Plath’s mirror poem below, this (altogether shorter) poem is spoken by the mirror itself, announcing that it stands between the spectator and their eyes and ‘collects no interest’. ![]() A cryptic imagist poem thus becomes a poem about ‘self-reflection’ in both senses.Įlizabeth Bishop, ‘ To Be Written on the Mirror in Whitewash’. But reflection is one of the interpretations of the poem that have been proposed – namely, that the short imagist masterpiece ‘The Pool’ describes the poet coming face-to-face with her own mirror-image in the surface of the water. To be honest, this poem doesn’t mention mirrors, and may not even be about reflections. In this poem, the great-grand-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes a speaker’s confrontation of a strange image in her mirror – an image which is some dark version of herself, possessed of ‘womanly despair’…
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