A Poem for Sunday
Sylvia Plath's "Mirror"
What’s better than a free poem on Sunday? Everything at The Declining Academic is free! So please…
Like many, I attach tragedy to Sylvia Plath, but in ways that differ from most. As I see it, the tragedy since Plath’s death is the focus on her death itself, on her personal life and traits, and on her relationship with her husband.
But the poetry! There isn’t enough focus on the work itself and Plath as a genius poet. She had one of the greatest instinctual senses of rhythm to grace the ear or page. I’m not talking about writing in iambic pentameter with some variations here and there (her heartbeat was always an anapest), but the ability to find the perfect rhythm for a line that informs its content inside a free-verse poem… without having to think about it!
I will post the entire poem below, but let me highlight one line that absolutely Webb Telescope’s my brain every time I read this poem—I just can’t believe it. The mirror itself is speaking, and reflects (pun very much intended, with good reason):
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
We have an obvious statement in what seems a very mundane line. It’s a mirror. It reflects what it faces… but it flips from front to back; the light that moves forward must move away, in the opposite direction.
Prepare to have your metrical minds blown (reminder: I will fight over scansion). Here is how the line scans—flipped from front to back, like a palindrome. It’s bananas!
/ u u / u / u / u u / u u /
Start with dactyl ( / u u )…end with anapest ( u u / — its opposite).
Second foot? A trochee ( / u ). The penultimate foot? An iamb ( u / — its opposite).
The middle section can be read as two trochees. In this case, the rhythm is not written as a perfect palindrome, but pretty darn close. That’s how superlative Sylvia Plath’s ear is, just on feel alone. Now, if you are feeling generous and read the word “meditate” as a dactyl ( / u u ), then the line scans as follows:
/ u u / u / u u / u / u u /
And that, folks, is a perfect metrical palindrome… in a line of poetry… about a mirror describing the literal action of reflecting the opposite wall back at itself… [rhythmically] flipped from front to back… like mirrors do!
Maybe you don’t care about poetic scansion…but I do because it’s super cool and important and affects language in countless ways outside of poetry. SO THERE!
Anyway, a poem for Sunday.
Mirror
by Sylvia Plath
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.
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 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.
That all applies to “interpretation” in general! But for the scansion, English is accentual-syllabic, so pure syllabic poetry in English, to my ear, is super forced, thus tri-meters fit better and sound more natural and, well, accentual.
I have a grudging respect for those who understand poetic scansion because I have no clue and never had one. BUT I also remain largely skeptical about the whole enterprise because what little study I've done in the subject suggests that even the "experts" can't agree what constitutes a stressed or unstressed syllable. Scansion systems are all over the map and provide no consistent aid for my (apparently) obtuse ear. You say you are willing to argue about scansion: well, duh, you had better be willing because all you scansion guys and gals count things differently, and are eager to promote your own particular reading (or hearing, or whatever). Anyway, I gave up on accentual metrics for my own work years ago and now, like Marianne Moore, rely mostly on pure syllabics. I can't count beats to save my life, but I can count syllables. And while there can be quibbles about syllables, there's far less room for argumentation, as far as I can tell.