Though often categorized as a “confessional poet,” Sylvia Plath did more than write semi-autobiographical poems. She also wrote poems like “Mirror” (1961), the speaker of which doesn’t resemble Plath at all. In fact, the speaker isn’t even human. At least initially, the speaker is the inanimate object named in the poem’s title. This personified mirror opens the poem by insisting on their lack of preconceptions, and they assert that they are truthful rather than cruel in the way they reflect the world. In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker undergoes a transformation and declares, “Now I am a lake” (line 10). Like the mirror, the lake claims that their reflective surface replicates the world above “faithfully” (line 13). These claims about objectively reflecting the world are mirrored in the poem’s structure. Indeed, the poem’s two stanzas, which are identical in length, mirror one another across the break in the middle. Yet in subtle ways, the speaker reveals that their reflections are perhaps less than objective. Both as a mirror and as a lake, the speaker reveals their emotional attachment to whatever it is they reflect, whether it’s a pink, speckled wall (in the mirror’s case) or an aging woman (in the lake’s case).

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