Page 3 - Microsoft Word - 8.2 class-6 Ch-8 mirror ln

 She was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She pushed her first poem at the
tender age of eight. Colossus was her first collection of poems, published in
1960.
 The Bell Jar, a semi autobiographical novel, was published in 1963.
 In 1965, her most famous collection of poems, Ariel, was published which has
poems like Daddy and Lady Lazarus.
 Her poems are considered confessional in style.
 Confessional poetry emphasises the intimate details about the poet’s personal
life and feelings.
 She was the first person to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982
posthumously.
 Mirror is a free verse and written in 1961 by the American poet Sylvia Plath.
 The poem is written from the perspectives of two entities: a mirror and a lake,
and the piece stands for the ideas of honesty, truth, and neutrality.
 Sylvia Plath chooses a simple everyday object, ‘a mirror’ in her poem and
puts perspective to it by assuming its voice and expressing things one would
barely think of.
 By using a mirror as the speaker of the poem, she explores the life of a
woman as she grows old from an outward perspective.
 Mirror is a truly unusual and unique piece as it attempts to present truth about
the self, unhindered even by personal conceptions.

READ & RELATE:

Now read the poem thoroughly and underline the important words.
(READING SKILLS) [PG 150- 151]

Now, lets take down the SUMMARY(To be written in the Eng CW Notebook)

The poem is divided into two stanzas with the first one establishing the nature of the
mirror as truthful, honest and impartial. Whereas the second concentrates on the life
of a woman where the mirror assumes the role of a lake. In the first stanza the mirror
tells us about itself and describes its experiences: what it has seen and what it does
most of the time. The second stanza of the poem looks at a woman through the eyes
of the mirror as a lake and describes her life and how she is slowly growing towards
old age. The central idea of the poem lies not so much in the words of the poem as
in what they represent.

First Stanza:

“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 a little god, four-cornered.
The mirror is presented in the first stanza as shiny (silver), exact and non-
judgmental. It presents everything as it is without any interpolation of its own. The
mirror is not driven by likes and dislikes, but is bluntly truthful. It calls itself ‘the eye of
a little god.’ This is because the mirror is impartial like a deity and moreover it shows