I believe that the poem "Mirror" is all about identity, how the image of the mirror is a reflection of Plath herself, searching for herself and reflecting her inner turmoil. The first stanza gives human qualities to the mirror, making it a prime example of personification. The mirror "mediates" and "reflects." The mirror is used to personify how young people only look at the superficial qualities of themselves as well as others. With the shift in stanzas, the lake becomes a metaphor. As people age, they look more inwardly rather than superficially. Unlike a mirror, a lake has depth. People look into bodies of water when they are soul searching or reflecting inwardly.…
To begin, in Ted Hughes’s 1999 poem collection Birthday Letters focuses on the pitfalls of the relationship while offering insight into the conflict’s origin. In Hughes’s poem “The Shot”, he identifies Plath’s obsession with her father’s death as the source of her distress through the use of an extended metaphor, use of imagery and visual structure. He begins by comparing Sylvia’s father to a “God” and her obsession as her “worship” to him as he describes, “Your worship needed a god. Where it lacked one, it found one here”. The religious reference communicates to us the audience the severity of her devotion and also her need to fulfil it with other male figures. Hughes continues to compare Plath’s consequent actions through an extended metaphor of a “bullet”. He describes her “You were gold-jacketed, solid silver, nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect. ” The detail within the imagery such as “gold”, ”silver” and “nickel” establishes Plath’s high maintenance and her determination through the short syntax of “trajectory perfect”. Therefore, we , the audience is presented with one of the perspectives which establishes the sources of conflict in the relationship.…
The woman in “Mirror” is uncertain about her appearance and struggles to accept the reality that she is aging while the mother in “In the Park” struggles with her pitiful existence. The woman’s dialogue with an ex-love, for whom it was “too late to feign indifference”, is in genuine because she does not believe that “time holds great surprises” but instead, her pretence is a way of masking a painful truth. Plath’s poem, however, sees lies revealed in the second stanza when the function of the mirror changes and the woman looks into its “reaches for what she really is”. When the mirror’s reflection reveals her truth, she rewards it with “and agitation of hands and tears”.…
Ronald Takaki is one of the foremost-recognized scholars of multicultural studies and holds a PhD. in American History from the University of California, Berkeley. As a professor of Ethnic Studies at the same university, he wrote A Different Mirror: a History of Multicultural America as a fantastic new telling of our nation’s history. The book narrates the composition of the many different people of the United States of America.…
Made with love, each person is deserving of love from others as well as from oneself. Unfortunately, humanity is becoming increasingly critical of physical appearances. After years of condemnatory thoughts, people, especially women, forget to remember the beauty in bodies; through this neglect, one doesn’t speak to oneself with adoration or respect. In Lucille Clifton’s poem, “what the mirror said,” self-love is explored through repetition, metaphors, and specific diction.…
In an age where younger generations of girls are taught that they are beautiful by just being themselves, there are subtle hints all around us that may express the opposite. Yes, beauty can come in all shapes and sizes but there can always be more to fix about ourselves; to become, or appear, more perfect. This concept of women having to conform to what is considered the feminine ideal is nothing new. The idea that women are valued based on the perception of others, specifically men, as portrayed in Ovid’s Pygmalion and Hesiod’s Works and Days, has been the central idea, or issue, in many contemporary works of art precisely because this idea still seems relevant in modern society.…
The themes of isolation, hopelessness and insanity are heightened greatly through the use of imagery and allusions. As the opening of the poem originates at midnight ‘the gloomiest’ time of the night with the only source of light irradiating from the moon, the only things can be seen through the moonlight indicating the importance of the moon. In a traditional sense, the moon was seen to represent the womanly grace associated with physic, intuitive and mysteriousness yet also in a way presenting a dark nature welded in a realm between the conscious and the unconscious. The fragile wordings embody the compassionate feats of the feminine and motherly side of the moon as she tenderly ‘smooths the hair of the grass.’ However there is a radical change in tone as ‘A washed-out smallpox cracks her face.’ As this line is ambiguous as to whether the persona was referring to the moon or a woman’s facial features or perhaps both. However in the artwork, a depiction of a crescent moon illuminates to a different notion of the beginning of a renewal cyclic change.…
Steven Gould Axelrod is an expert in nineteenth and twentieth-century American poetry, and his book “Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words” was published in 1990. Sylvia Plath was an American poet, born in 1932, and died in 1963 when she committed suicide. I totally agreed with Steven Gould Axelrod’s idea in this book, especially when he said that the poem “Daddy,” Sylvia’s most famous poem – is dramatic and allegorical. At the beginning of the book, Axelrod mostly focused on Sylvia’s life and how “Daddy” was brought into the world, then in the middle of the book, he compared how Sylvia described her father in her two poets, “Daddy” and “The Colossus,” and at the end, he continued to compare the figure “I” in “Daddy” and “The Colossus,” Sylvia herself identity.…
Sylvia Plath was born to middle class family in Massachusetts. Plath published her first poem when she was 8.She was bright, sensitive, was a perfectionist at everything she attempted. She was a brilliant kid, getting A grades in school, winning the top prizes. She was a model daughter. By 1950 when she joined Smith College she already had an remarkable list of publication.…
Plath 's poetry is full of symbols and allusions cryptic to those unfamiliar with her biography, so it is necessary to begin any analysis of her work with a brief account of her life. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 near Boston and for much of her childhood lived near the sea, which finds its way into many of her poetic images (Barnard 14). Her father, Otto Emil Plath, was an immigrant from Germany and her mother, Aurelia Schober, a second generation Austrian American (Barnard 13). Allusions to her German heritage and to World War Two era Europe abound in her work.…
This underlying theme and aspirations of achieving beauty is ever-present in this poem. From its beginning to its very conclusion, with the woman’s day dreams about people looking at her in awe…
Identity is the basic characteristics that determine a person’s fact of being. The short story “Mirror Image” illiterates this using different conflicts, such as physical attributes, mental, emotional, and spiritual factors. Alice, who had a brain transplant surgery after a car accident. Her brain is transplanted to another girl’s body named Gail, who is 2 years older than her and has totally different experiences from which Alice has. She struggles finding what defines her, being confused trusting her body’s willing or her brain till the end of the story. Trough Alice’s whole experience, soul can be regarded as the most significant influence on identity rather than her body’s willing or her brain. It can be observed through the literary devices of internal conflict and external conflict.…
Specific examples of how the female persona is saying that she has an inappropriate sexual attraction to the cruel male figure without directly stating this fact are examined. This article provided new insight on how to investigate Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy. This article also support my thesis through the domination of the female persona in the poem she is also experiencing sexual desires of her father.…
Seeking an understanding of obscure changes in an individual's life and refusing to conform to social normalities, stimulates a discovery of self-identity. This is evident in the last two stanzas of the poem ‘Naked Girl and Mirror’, when the protagonist seeks her individuality in the mist of her confusion of adolescence. Wright’s use of oxymoron “lovely, hateful” reveals to the audience the self-conflict the protagonist has with herself. The word ‘lovely’ which represents something beautiful accentuate that the character still has a sense of self-love despite her forced changes. Although physically she is changing, mentally her perception of who she was is still present, that she still sees a sweet girl within herself. However, the word ‘hateful’ which corresponds with detesting something illustrates the protagonists loathe for her new bodily figure because of the expectations that are placed upon her by society now that she is a woman, which strips away her individualism. Although the character has a sense of hatred for this process, Wright uses high modality of “must” and “will” in “I must serve you; I will obey” to establish further to the audience the new perception the character acquires. Through Wright’s use of high modality it promotes the resolution the protagonist has found within herself. By submitting to who she now is, underlines that she is doing this for herself in order to gain full self-acceptance and that she is placing herself first before society. Thus, Wright expresses that experiences will result to individuals gaining a new unexpected perception of…
This poem dramatizes the theme of unreturned love, particularly as this theme relates to the pessimistic sacrifices of the persona. From this poem, the persona tells about one of his/her past personal experiences. The flow of words from the first stanza until the last stanza creates an atmosphere of tense, desperation and passion of the persona, who is trying to win the heart of whom he/she loves dearly. The poem records the change of mood and offerings of the persona according to different parts of the day. It is also the recording of a passage from hope to delusion. The use of Simple Past underlines that the relation between the two persons is completely finished. The different parts of the day resemble the phases of a love story that the persona has faced. The different settings and flowers used in each…