Who's The Fairest of Them All? - PR #2

                                                       Who's The Fairest of Them All?

       "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath is a poem that really made me think about the complexity of a mirror. The speaker showed me that a mirror is more than an object. This poem includes personification as the speaker indirectly mentioned two possible things a mirror could be. In the first stanza, the speaker shows the mirror to be a person, "I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions" (1). In the second stanza, the mirror is metaphorically a lake, "Now I am a lake" (10).
       This poem seems to refer to seeing your true self. In the beginning of the second stanza, a woman is introduced to the poem. She's trying to see her true self by looking at her reflection in the 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" (10-12). The woman can't see herself by the lighting of the moon or candles because they don't show her actual face, only an illusion. Plath uses imagery to show how long the woman looked at her reflection in the lake, "In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish" (17-18).