CBSE ADDA 10th English -Mirror- Summary
In this poem, the mirror is the speaker. It is an autobiographical
poem. The mirror talks about itself, its surroundings and the woman who uses
it. In this way, it gives its observations in an objective way without any
personal bias. The mirror say that its appearance is silver and exact. It does
not have any pre-conceptions or anything else about its existence. It is just
what it is "Unmisted by love or dislike". It is neither cruel nor
biased nor prejudiced, only truthful.
It can be called the eye of a little god, four-cornered, that is,
it is framed in a four cornered frame and it remains fixed on the wall and sees
the opposite wall and only when someone comes between it and the wall or at
night or in darkness, the reflection of the opposite wall goes away.
The mirror is like a lake, it drowns the face of the woman, who
tries to see her reflection in it. She searches for her, beauty which she had
in her youth. She grows sad to see herself old now. She then turns to
"candles" or the moon "which the mirror calls "liars"
because these create a misted kind of surrounding around the woman's face due
to which she does not see the wrinkles or signs of old age. But the woman's
real identity is revealed by the mirror. Seeing her changed face, the woman sheds
some tears and moves her hands angrily.
The mirror is very important to the woman. Every morning she sees
herself and she is filled with her fear at her reflection of having grown old.
She feels like a fish out of water, but the mirror can't do anything as it reflects
only the truth - that is what one really is. So, in this way, the mirror claims
to be a very objective opinion giver or reflector of images.
About
the poetess : Born in 1932 to middle class parents in Jamaica Plain,
Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath published her first poem at the age of eight. A
sensitive person who tended to be a bit of a perfectionist she was what many
would consider a model daughter and student - popular, a straight A student,
always winning the best prizes. She won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950
and even then she had an enviable list of publications. While at Smith she
wrote over four hundred poems.
However, beneath the surface of her seeming perfection were some
grave discontinuities, some which probably were caused by the death of her
father, an entomologist, when she was eight. During the summer after her junior
year in college, Sylvia made her first (and almost successful) attempt at
suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. The experience is described in her
autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar , published in 1963. After a period of
recovery, which involved electroshock and psychotherapy she once again pursued
academic and literary success, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955
and winning a Fulbright scholarship to study in Cambridge, England.
In 1956, she married Ted Hughes, an English poet, and in 1960, at
the age of twenty-eight she published her first book, The Colossus in England.
The poems found in the book clearly showed the dedication with which she
pursued her apprenticeship, yet they only gave a taste of what was to come in
the poems she began writing in early 1961. She and Hughes settled for a brief
time in an English country village in Devon, England. However, less than two
years after the birth of their first child the marriage disintegrated.
In the winter if 1962-63, one of the coldest in centuries, Sylvia
lived in a small flat in London, with her two children, ill with the flu and
nearly broke. The difficulties in her life seemed to reinforce her need to write
and she often worked between 4 and 8 a.m., before the children awoke. She would
sometimes finish a poem a day. In her last works it seems as though some deeper
and more powerful self had grabbed control of her. In those poems death is
given a cruel, physical allure and psychic pain becomes almost tactile.
On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath succeeded in killing herself
with cooking gas at the age of thirty. Two years after her death, Ariel , a
collection of some her last poems was published, that was followed by Crossing
the Water and Winter Trees in 1971 and in 1981 The Collected Poems was
published, edited by none other than Ted Hughes.
is this an autobiography of a mirror ....or can i say this an autobiography..?
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