"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul" (-George Bernard Shaw)

I have always loved Sylvia Plath’s poetry.

So autobiographical, it can be brooding, troublesome, and frightening; visceral and vulnerable all at once. One of her poems that used to illicit lots of discussion in my college English classes when I was teaching was this one. A powerful poem...

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately.

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful-

The eye of the 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.

(-Sylvia Plath)