“Mirror” features a speaker that is unique in two key ways. First, rather than being a human, the speaker is an inanimate object. Second, the speaker is bifurcated, such that they start as an inanimate object and become a different kind of inanimate entity halfway through. In the opening stanza, the speaker identifies themself as a mirror that is “silver and exact” (line 1). Then, in the second stanza, they proclaim: “Now I am a lake” (line 10). By using the adverb of time, “now,” in this way, the speaker asserts a continuity of consciousness between the first stanza and the second, despite the apparent change in identity. But this shift doesn’t indicate a transfer of consciousness from one personified object to another. Rather, the shift suggests that we should understand the speaker in a more abstract way. That is, instead of being one kind of reflective entity then another, the speaker is arguably best identified the property of reflection itself.

Interpreting the speaker as the property of reflection enables us to understand the different senses in which the mirror and the lake reflect—and reflect on—their distinct worlds. Both the mirror and the lake insist on their objectivity. In the mirror’s case, they insist on their lack of preconceptions, and they assert that they’re truthful rather than cruel in the way they reflect the world, “unmisted by love or dislike” (line 3). Yet the mirror subtly undermines its claim to objectivity 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.

Here, the mirror describes how they “meditate” the speckled wall directly across from them. The use of the word meditate suggests a deeper kind of reflection than we might expect from a mirror, implying a dimension of depth beyond the flat silver surface. The mirror affirms this sense of depth when they indicate that the speckled wall “is part of [their] heart.” A similar phenomenon occurs when, later, the lake claims that they reflect the aging woman “faithfully”—a word that connotes loyalty as much as objectivity. In these ways, the mirror and the lake both literally reflect and figuratively reflect on whatever appears before them.

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