Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Pink Wall

In the poem’s first stanza, the speaker (a mirror) describes how they have spent most of their days reflecting a pink wall that has, over time, become “part of [their] heart” (line 8). Despite being just an architectural feature of the room where the mirror is installed, this pink wall functions in the poem as an abstracted symbol of femininity. Pink is often culturally associated with femininity, which implicitly feminizes the wall. Just as the mirror spends all their time reflecting an image of this feminized wall, so too does the wall spend all “her” time “staring” at her own image in the mirror. If we readers personify the wall the same way Plath has personified the mirror, it becomes possible to think of the wall as a symbolic stand-in for a woman. The pinkness may then be read as “skin,” and the “speckles” (line 7) could be interpreted as imperfections in the skin’s “complexion.” Taken together, these interpretive leaps conjure an abstracted image of a woman staring in the mirror, self-conscious about her appearance. Read in this way, the pink wall connects to the unreasonable standards of beauty that women faced in Plath’s era, and which they continue to face to this day.

The Woman

In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker (now a lake) describes a woman who visits their shores every day. This woman has evidently visited the lake since the time she was a girl, but now she has grown old. The lake indicates as much in their 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.

From the lake’s geological perspective, the woman’s life has passed very quickly. The sense of shock at the recognition of life’s brevity becomes clear in the violent image the speaker uses to narrate the woman’s passage from girlhood to womanhood. But this violent image also expresses more than just shock. When the lake says that the woman has “drowned” her younger self in their waters, they implicitly cast judgment on the woman for growing older. Not only has the aging woman metaphorically killed her own youth and taken its place, but she is also becoming more monstrous in appearance, “day after day.” Far removed from her earlier beauty, now she looks “like a terrible fish.” Read in this way, the woman stands as a symbol for the cultural tendency to privilege youth and beauty—and particularly the youthful beauty of women, who are particularly susceptible to social and cultural forms of devaluation as they age.