Mirror

Francine Van Hove

Mirror

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 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 back to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back and I 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.

Sylvia Plath


This poem is the opposite perspective of Robert Grave's "The Face In the Mirror" (posted Oct.29, 2016) in which a man looks at himself in a mirror. Here the mirror talks back. It reminds me of of Alice in Wonderland's "Through the Looking Glass", where Lewis Carroll questions what the world "over there" is all about and why everything is reversed in it. It's the old question of image vs. identity. Plath is a brilliantly sharp writer, and "Mirror" has teeth, which might not be what you want in a poem, but it's useful, and poetry should be useful. The mirror describes itself, "Silver and exact/no preconceptions/unmisted by love or dislike..", the sense is there of a dispassionate faithfulness to truth (with a dash of malevolence!). The mirror knows that it is important to the woman but it has no feeling for her (as it seems to for the wall). And for all it says it is "only truthful", it lies, it does not "see". It is not an eye, it is entirely blind. It is a reflector, a surface. It wants something, too. It wants to be worshiped, "a little four-cornered god". It pretends to have depths because it wants to swallow and drown. And the woman searches it for what she really is. There's the bite right there.