Addiction

MIRROR
                                  – SLYVIA PLATH

The poem ‘Mirror’ is an autobiographical account of mirror, highlighting its qualities. It reflects how a woman is disappointed and frustrated to see her gradually fading beauty and youth. It symbolizes the eternal truth of old age and loss of beauty in the course of life. The mirror is real and shining. It is unbiased. It shows what comes to it. It is a monologue of the protagonist Mirror who is free of any preconceptions and prejudice. It is not distorted by emotions of love or hatred as human beings do.
GIST OF THE POEM:
(Lines 1-4)
The mirror in the poem symbolizes the eternal truth of life. It is real and shining. It is silver in colour and appears perfectly smooth. It does not judge other with pre-conceived ideas like human beings. It does not have any pre-decided ideas and doesn’t get affected by love or dislike.
It has no feelings, emotions and preferences. It reflects exact what comes to it. It shows the person’s accurate image from any kind of distortion. Since mirror is exact, truthful and objective, it may appear as unfeeling and cruel, though it is not so.
(Lines 5-9)
The mirror says that it is above any kind of personal feeling. It is like God, who sees the truth and views everything from all corners of the world. It is something mystic and divine, above the ordinary and the worldly. So, like God, the mirror looks at everything with equal eye. Most of the time, it keeps thinking about the opposite wall which is pink and has on it. It has grown passionate about it and now it has begun to think of the wall as a part of its heart, here it means that it has become an integral part of its being, consciousness and existence. The wall flickers i.e. its view shakes and dims with changes in the shades of light. The mirror’s view of the wall is interrupted by the people’s faces and the darkness when they stand between the mirror and the wall.
(Line 10-13)
The mirror says that sometimes it is...