Previous

Assonance and Consonance

Assonance and consonance play an important role in bringing a poetic flair to the otherwise direct, unadorned language of “Mirror.” Assonance and consonance are sibling concepts, in that they both refer to the repetition of certain sounds in adjacent or nearby words. Assonance specifically refers to the repetition of vowel sounds, whereas consonance refers to the repetition of consonant sounds. Plath makes use of both techniques, often weaving them together in the same passage. Let’s start by looking at examples of assonance in the poem’s three opening lines:

     I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
     Whatever I see I swallow immediately
     Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

This passage is organized around an interplay of two different I sounds: the long I, as in the first-person pronoun “I,” and the short I, as in the word “it.” The speaker says “I” four times in this short passage, which might initially suggest that their perspective is too subjective. Arguably, however, the increasing frequency of short I sounds in the second and third lines soften that sense of subjectivity. Now, let’s look at examples of consonance in the same passage:

     I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
     Whatever I see I swallow immediately
     Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

This passage foregrounds S and L sounds. Even as the speaker insists on the objectivity of their gaze, the evident sonic pattern may suggest a preference for certain sounds over others.

Personification

Personification refers to instances where a poet invests an inanimate object or abstract concept with human-like attributes or feelings. This literary device is central to “Mirror,” whose speaker is a reflective surface: first a mirror, then a lake. By inhabiting the experiences of these two different inanimate entities, Plath imagines the world from a radically different perspective, while still conveying those perspectives in uniquely human terms. For instance, a mirror doesn’t “see” the same way as a human. However, Plath imagines what it might feel like to be a mirror if it could, in fact, see. We get a glimpse of such speculation in lines 6–9:

     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.

In these lines, Plath describes the mirror’s meditative gaze. She also suggests how differently a mirror might experience time through the image of the speckled wall flickering in and out as “faces and darkness separate us over and over.” Like the mirror, the lake provides a point of view that’s radically different from that of a human. Also like the mirror, the lake proclaims that it reflects what it sees “faithfully” (line 13), and hence more objectively than any human. Of course, whether we (human) readers believe that claim is up to us.

Simile and Metaphor

Despite the speaker’s largely unadorned speech, they close the poem with a startling burst of figurative language that features both simile and metaphor. Recall that a simile (SIH-muh-lee) is a figure of speech that explicitly compares two unlike things to each other. A metaphor (MEH-tuh-for), by contrast, makes a more implicit comparison between two unlike things. Both simile and metaphor appear in the poem’s closing lines (17–18):

     In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
     Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

The simile is easier to spot, since it features the word “like” to make the comparison explicit: “like a terrible fish.” With these words, the speaker compares the reflection of the aging woman’s face in the water to the frightful image of a fish’s face hovering just beneath the surface. The metaphor is a bit more difficult to spot, and it appears in the opening clause: “In me she has drowned a young girl.” Here, the speaker implicitly likens the process of aging to drowning. The young girl the woman is said to have “drowned” is simply her younger self.

Previous section Rhyme

Take a Study Break