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READ THIS
A young woman (the poet herself?) looks constantly into two mirrors: a rectangular mirror in the house
and the glimmering surface of a nearby lake.
Each mirror claims to present the woman with perfect images of herself, and yet each indicates a degree
of growing unhappiness within the woman who is viewing herself.
ABOUT THE POET
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1932.
She was an intelligent child -- she had her first poem published when she was only eight -- but she also
displayed a marked degree of sensitivity. She sought perfection in all that she did.
Her father -- a college professor and a bee expert -- died of an illness when the poet was still young.
He apparently thought it was cancer but in reality it was a curable form of diabetes.
His untimely death appears to have scarred the young child's sensitive mind.
She entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 and, while there, wrote some 400 poems. During
her first year, however, she attempted suicide through an overdose of sleeping pills.
She graduated from Smith College summa cum laude in 1955 and thereupon won a Fulbright
scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England.
While there, she met and married the English poet, Ted Hughes. Their marriage, however, would last a
mere ten years before Sylvia found herself divorced.
She was alone once more, but now a stranger in a small London flat. She was also poor and with two
children to look after. This was a foreign existence for one who had always been accustomed to the
comforts of middle-class life.
The winter of 1962 to 1963 was one of the coldest, during which time the poet was continually ill with flu.
She learnt first hand much about the harshness of life.
She nevertheless worked furiously in the very early mornings while the children slept, producing a poem
virtually every day.
Towards the end of that winter -- in February 1963 -- she committed suicide by gassing herself in her
kitchen. She was then only 30 years of age.
She had not yet won the recognition she so richly deserved as a poet. Like so many great artists, fame
would follow only after her death.
Have you looked at the questions
in the right column?
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TEST YOURSELF!
Read the left column and then answer
the following questions:
"Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is."
[Need help?]
Presumably the woman is the poet herself. On the other hand, she could represent every woman. The
poem is therefore an expression of a personal sentiment or pain, or it is the summing up of what all
women experience sometime in their lives.
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- What is this search "for what she really is"? (2)
[Need help?]
This is the great philosophical search for the meaning of life. Many people start out in search of this but
few appear ever to find it.
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- Did the poet find it? Would she ever find it? (4)
[Need help?]
Probably not. The woman is searching her own reflection for the meaning of life but she sees there only
that which she wishes to see. Her "meaning of life" is therefore biassed by her own negative
outlook.
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"Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon."
- What do the candles and the moon represent? (4)
[Need help?]
Candles are probably the stars. But candles and the moon are always inextricably tied together as images
of romance and of romantic love.
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- Why does the woman find the candles and the moon to be "liars"? (4)
[Need help?]
The woman has reached the state where her romantic life has broken down. When she sees the stars
and the moon, therefore, she does not witness the hope of romance but rather the very breakdown of
romantic love.
The candles and the moon are therefore liars when they promise her anything romantic, for there is no
longer anything romantic that can be promised to her.
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"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."
- The lake, like the mirror in the house, gives the impression of being an accurate and emotionless
presenter of the world. Would you like to comment? (4)
[Need help?]
Like the mirror in the house, the lake speaks of reflecting the woman's image "faithfully".
At the same time, however, the mirror does not appear to appreciate the tears and the wringing of her
hands in misery. Instead, it says simply, "I am important to her".
In other words, it reveals that it understands nothing of what is happening in her life.
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"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."
- What is it that the mirror is revealing that appears to have upset the woman? (6)
[Need help?]
There are two things which appear to have upset her.
First is the breakdown of romantic love. In the poet's case, this is possibly the collapse of her own
marriage -- or was this poem written before her divorce?
Second, she appears to be distraught at the simple aging process. The woman first came to the lake as
a young girl but day after day she watches the aging process as she steadily witnesses the rise of "an
old woman".
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- Why would the lake use the image of "the terrible fish"? (2)
[Need help?]
For a lake, surrounded by beauty, the only thing that it knows that is ugly would be the face of an old fish.
It is a "terrible" fish because it represents the aging process.
And remember too that one of the worst insults one can make of a woman is to call her a "fish-wife".
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Explain how this poem is a reflection of a woman who is unable to face up to the realities of life. (4)
[Need help?]
Aging and death are the fundamental processes of living. Every day, therefore, one witnesses in the
mirror the face of a person who is slightly older than before.
The poet is perhaps reflecting her own inability to handle the aging process, or perhaps she is reflecting
the eternal inability of most people to face up to the reality of aging.
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Does the knowledge that the poet attempted suicide at least twice -- the second time successfully --
give any further meaning to this poem? (4)
[Need help?]
Perhaps, but perhaps not.
Some critics argue that this is a poem by an unbalanced person, one who is unable to accept the nature
of living, one whose personal unbalanced life has led her to attempt suicide.
On the other hand, can one not argue that the poet is merely echoing the universal crisis facing all women:
that they are all growing older and that their looks -- once their prized possession -- will always be
fading? Not only that, but the fading of their beauty happens very quickly.
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