Poetry Rewrite of Sylvia Plath PDF

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Rewrite of Mirror and commentary alongside...

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Emily Dixon

Poetry Rewrite and Commentary Sylvia Plath – Mirror 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. Rewrite This pane mocks me. This blank fullness of glass. Watching with a critic’s eye And waiting for me to gain the depth of another wrinkle. My hands wring themselves innately As the frustration build up inside of me. I think This object has taken control over me and resides As a figure of my deity with the power to crush And crumble me down to little more than A fine ivory powder.

Emily Dixon

But this being does not have control. What it desperately tries to accomplish is lost As I reminisce of the past lovers, the friends and the Chaos I endured to make me who I am. The powder crumbles further, near liquid as My hands relax and all the tension is released. I emerge from the dust as a new woman One with the sense of a thousand elders who Before me have endured the exact same.

Commentary Sylvia Plath wrote Mirror in 1961. The poem is two stanzas and written using 1st person from the perspective of a mirror. The poem’s main focus is of an introspection that the subject is going through from the outsider viewpoint that is the mirror’s and contains many of her typical stylistic choices such as dark undertones, vivid imagery and subtlety. These dark undertones often included in her poetry may reflect her inner turmoil at the time of writing as she ‘suffered a characteristic sense of existential insecurity’ 1. I have included her stylistic choices as I feel it separates Plath’s work from many other writers at the time but I have changed the viewpoint to that of the subject’s in order to develop a new narrative. One of pride and joy in experiencing the ups and downs of life instead of a negative outlook.

1 David Holbrook, ‘Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence’, (The Athlone Press: 1988), p.1

Emily Dixon

Mirror is a catoptric poem, a poem that has two stanzas that are in opposition, which shows first the mirror’s self-assessment and then the woman’s deeper analysis of herself. Due to the publications of Plath’s work, information on the layout of a poem can also be observed as ‘the gaps between stanzas […] deserve attention’2. This spatial divide with the separation into stanzas shows a physical distancing between both the mirror and the woman and also a metaphorical distancing. Each in opposition, logic versus emotion. My rewrite at first mimics this separation between the two subjects’ by showing the agitation as her hands ‘wring themselves’ but she finds a pride and inner peace through her age and wisdom she has collected along the way. My rewrite ends on a less ambiguous tone as we are unsure if the woman in Mirror has been resurrected in a beneficial light or not. This ending provides a more uplifting message which is not what Plath is known for but I feel there is an uplifting sensation in the acceptance of aging so I implied this in my work. In Mirror there is a prolific use of enjambment such as ‘only truthful, // The eye of a little god’ which creates a flowing dynamic and a less formal tone, much similar to the rhythm of human speech. This atmosphere of freedom is also created by there being no strict rhyming pattern as the poem is in free verse. I have also used enjambment in my poem but more so to show a rising of tension within the subject as her frustration deepens with ‘As a figure of my deity with the power to crush // and crumble me down’ with the power that the mirror has over her. The frustration is replicated by the longer sentence length which increases pace and tension. This is especially noticed when put in comparison to the other previous shorter sentences. Plath uses personification throughout her poem to give the inanimate mirror a voice, and to create an emotional bond with the reader. However, the cold and unforgiving personality it has been given causes conflict for the reader as we are trying to create bonds with a being that is ‘exact’ and has ‘no preconceptions’. Plath’s use of this simulates the frustration that the woman is going through, and our empathies switch from the mirror to the woman. In this light, the mirror almost villainizes itself. In my poem, I focused on the mirror as being the main villain who is a ‘deity’ for her and as we hear from the woman’s voice this effect is intensified. Our empathies are solely with her and her frustration. That is why the ending, when she accepts her aging, is so satisfying for the reader due to the ‘completeness’ 3 felt, it finishes the narrative loop that Plath left open and closes an enigma. Powerplay is a big underlying theme in Plath’s mirror and also my rewrite. The mirror hedonistically refers to itself as ‘the eye of a little god’ and seems to grow in the fact that it holds all this power despite being only ‘four cornered’. This idea is reminiscent of Narcissus, the Greek mythological story in which a man falls in love with himself and dies.4 Plath’s implication here is that mirror’s hold too much power over their onlooker due to the importance that we transfer on our aesthetics and beauty. But the woman’s reliance on the mirror empowers it and 2 Judy Kendall, ‘Edward Thomas: The Origins of his Poetry’, (University of Wales Press), p.107 3 Brian Richardson, James Phalen, Peter Rabinowitz, ‘Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure and Frames’, (The Ohio State University Press), p.252 4 Ovid, ‘Metamorphoses’, (Hackett Publishing Company), p.77

Emily Dixon

belittles herself in the meantime as she ‘drowned a young girl’. I have replicated this feeling of powerlessness in the woman as she is crumbled down ‘to a fine dust’ but as the narrative develops, she sees the power that she is putting into the mirror and retreats, taking her confidence and wisdom back with her. However, the woman also has a deeper focus on her personality, rather than just her beauty. She ‘searches […] for what she really is’ inside the lake. In doing so she creates a distinction between her exterior self, her beauty, and her interior self being her psyche and becomes an open-minded woman who pays much less attention to the mirror that she once gave all her power to. This freedom is also mimicked in my rewrite with the imagery of her ‘emerge from the dust as a new woman’ and with a new-found wisdom. Overall, my rewrite of Mirror managed to capture glimpses of Plath’s style with the use of her poetic techniques such as personification, imagery and dark undertones. The stylistic techniques that Plath uses are well developed after the many poems she has written throughout her lifetime and I aimed to apply this in my poem.

Bibliography Lyne Sandford, ‘writing poetry from the inside out’, (Sourcebooks Inc.) Plath Sylvia, ‘Collected Poems’, (Faber and Faber)...