Fish scare me, but so does growing old and ugly

Mirror

by Silvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you 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 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.

Fish are fast – much quicker and smoother swimmers than humans, who power through water with calculated strokes and breaths. Ubiquitously, they bullet past us, around us, and underneath us; the sea is their terrain, and fish know exactly how to navigate its waters. Humans, on the other hand, do not. Wading hip-deep in unclear water, I feel alarmed, taunted, and teased, when a fish brushes against my unsuspecting leg. It’s as if the creature’s saying, ‘I know you can’t see me from up there, that you’re basically blind. Why don’t you do yourself a favor and leave?’ By comparing a woman’s fear of senility to a “terrible fish”, Sylvia Plath delivers maximum impact at the end of her poem. Like the alien fish whose unblinking eyes inch closer and closer to my paranoid body, the concept of growing old and ugly is an unwelcome, nagging, and utterly irrational fear for many women.

Now, I’d bet money that ‘fear’ and ‘apprehension’ are AP exam-worthy ‘tone’ words for this timeless poem; although it was written fifty years ago, “Mirror” continues to be relevant to our glossy, airbrushed world. Told from the honest perspective of a mirror, the piece pinpoints the crippling insecurities of girl- and womanhood. “Unmisted by love or dislike”, the frank reflection of the mirror agonizes the woman who stares so intently at it. Through the mirror, she might see a wrinkle, a gray hair, a pimple, a frown line – all of which fade away in the presence of “those liars, the candles or the moon.” The lights cast by the moon and candles symbolize romance as much as they do deception. The woman knows this. No matter how many times lovers and friends tell her she is beautiful, she assumes that they do not know enough about her, the ‘true’ her. Their compliments are as ill-defined as candlelight is on her features and as fickle as promises made by ‘lovers’ under the moon.

In an effort to differentiate the real from the sugar-coated, the woman trusts only the mirror that is “silver and exact....not cruel, only truthful.” But no matter how truthful the mirror is, it cannot speak to the woman. If we really wanted to be technical, we’d see that nothing would be beautiful or ugly, black or white, right or wrong, good or bad, trite or fresh, in a view that is 100% 'true' . Everything would just be. A view that has zero preconceptions does not hold an opinion of any kind; therefore, a reflected image only means something – anything – if someone's there to interpret it. The irony of the poem is that the woman turns to the mirror for an unbiased perspective, only to batter it with her own, critical judgment. She seeks validation from a mirror that holds no opinions, thereby setting herself up to be disappointed, time and time again, by her own preconceived notions of herself.