LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,878)
  • Text Authors (20,870)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,129)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)

Mirror
Language: English 
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 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 the 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.

Text Authorship:

  • by Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963), appears in Crossing the Water, first published 1971 [author's text not yet checked against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

  • by Phillip Lambro (b. 1935), "Mirror", published 1974 [ soprano and orchestra ], from Four Songs, no. 3 [sung text not yet checked]
  • by Elizabeth Walton Vercoe (b. 1941), "Mirror", 1975 [ soprano, piano, vibraphone ], from Herstory I, no. 5 [sung text checked 1 time]

Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2007-08-17
Line count: 18
Word count: 170

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2026 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris