Mirror by Sylvia Plath: A poem every woman should read at least once.

As an English major, I was required to read an extraordinary amount of literature during a four year period. Much of it I loved, and some of it made me fall asleep on my couch by 8:00 on a Friday night. One evening, when I wasn’t bored into a way too wordy book coma, I stumbled across this poem as I was doing a research project on the life and works of Sylvia Plath. I was so moved by this poem, that it has never been good enough to know that it’s always available right here on my bookshelf, so I printed it out, and it hangs proudly on my refrigerator for all of my guests to read. This is one of my many favorite poems.

Mirror

by Sylvia Plath

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 had drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.