In Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror,” the reflecting surface is also a metaphor for a reflective or contemplative state. By itself, the mirror, which Plath describes as the “four-cornered” eye of a god, has “no preconceptions,” showing only the truth, without cruelty. Most often the mirror contemplates the speckled wall it faces, which demands no answers from the mirror.

Here, Plath alludes to the magical mirrors in Snow White and other fairy tales, which were tasked with answering important questions such as “Who’s the fairest of them all?” In Plath’s poem, the mirror suggests it doesn’t like answering questions, which is why the silent, undemanding wall has become a “part of its heart.” The wall treats the mirror as what it is, expecting no magic, which makes the mirror fall in love with it.

However, the mirror’s contemplation of the wall is disturbed by both “faces and darkness.” Out of the two interruptions, it is the face of a woman—probably its owner—that ruffles the mirror’s honest quietude the most.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

Unlike the wall, which asked nothing of the mirror, the woman wants something momentous from it. She treats the mirror as a “lake,” a three-dimensional body which hides answers. From this lake, the woman wants to fish out selves, both lost and ideal. However, the mirror is just a two-dimensional mirror. It may be god-like, but it is bound by its nature, which is to show the truth. It can only reflect what is in front of it, but the woman doesn’t like what she sees, rewarding the mirror with “tears”.

With the aid of “liars”—the forgiving light of candles and moon—the woman hopes the mirror can work some alchemy, but the mirror fails her. At another level, we can also say that the woman sees in the mirror what she wants to see, which is herself as inadequate. Thus, the mirror reflects both the woman’s external and internal realities. What the woman wants is to retrieve perfection and the past, which the mirror suggests is impossible. At the same time, she dreads the future, her eventual mature self, rising up to meet her.

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.

Through the metaphor of the mirror, Plath also comments on the unrealistic beauty standards to which women have been subjected through the ages. Just like with the Queen in Snow White, the woman in the poem is forced into believing youthful beauty is her only source of power. In the quest to appear young and pretty, the woman develops a toxic relationship with the mirror, depending on it to validate her existence. If only she could accept the truth of aging and the inherent beauty of growth, she would be as objective as the wall, and the mirror would show her a brighter reality.