As I had mentioned in my previous post about mirrors and how they affect our characters, here's a fitting poem by Sylvia Plath:
Mirrors
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
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 a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
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.
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.
7 comments:
Incredible poem. Thanks for posting.
I loved (as much as you can love that book, that is) The Bell Jar and my boyfriend is a great fan of Sylvia Plath. I have read some of her poetry before, but never this one. I'm in awe now.
I thought of this today. I started a book by Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite. The book is dedicated to Lewis Carroll in the first place and there's many instances where the narrator is looking at herself in the mirror, wondering about this kind of thing. Also looking at paintings and engravings and feeling pulled inside them. Very interesting. And a nice coincidence :)
Hi Cristina!
I am glad you liked the poem! Plath is in many ways a difficult poet, but also one whose writing strike a chord with the depths of one's being.
I too am fascinated with the concept of mirrors and what they reflect--whether what we see is what we are or if it is only an illusion.
I am intrigued by your suggesting the connection to paintings and mirrors and would love to hear more, if you can elaborate! :)
Hmmm... I'll try, but it's complicated. This is a woman - the author, in fact - who is home alone one night. She's in her room and suddenly she stumbles on the mirror. This is a very rough translation of what she sees:
Inside the mirror, the room looks fictitious in its static reality. It gravitates behind my back and I'm scared - because of its sheer astonishment - of the look that excessively vertical figure gives me, with its arms hanging at the sides of its blue pyjamas. I turn anxiously, wishing I could get back by surprise the truth in that dislocation glimpsed only a few moments ago. But out of the mirror the normalcy it reflected persists....
Moments later she looks up at an engraving hanging close by. Again, very roughly translated:
The letters in the engraving help me escape the enchantment the drawn room was starting to have over me. It seemed to gain in dimensions and profundity. I was falling inside it....
And indeed, later in the book we don't know whether she's dreaming or awake or imagining... She seems to be inside the mirror, since she's inside her own mind. Very good book. I now see it's been translated into English: The Back Room by Carmen Martín Gaite: http://www.citylights.com/pub/catalog/BCback.html
Thanks Cristina!"It" does sound very interesting!So she seems to lose herself in both the mirror and the painting. However, in the bits you've quoted that is, she contrasts the "normalcy" of the view from the mirror with the "gain in dimension and profundity" of the view from the painting. Does this mean the painting has more of a power over her than the mirror?
I think being inside the mirror could potentially be a very enventful trip ;)
I do think she means to say that the engraving has more power over her than the mirror. Something like reality vs fiction, perhaps.
The book so far is *full* of allusions to mirrors, btw. Amazing coincidence.
"Something like reality vs fiction, perhaps"
I wonder if what see in the mirror is in fact reality. Perhaps the mirror is a device of deception--in that instead of showing the truth, it makes us believe something that is not.
But then, this begs the question: What is reality?
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