"Here, Plath presents the first of several unexpectedly violent images, as she depicts the mirror immediately swallowing all it comes into contact with "without regard to the emotional concerns of "love and dislike. The mirror's denial of its cruelty in line four seems based on the proposition that truth cannot be equated with cruelty "a proposition which will come under closer scrutiny in the poem's final lines- ("Mirror-). The mirror then calls itself "the eye of a little god-. "Plath seems to be using the cold and unemotional reflection of the mirror as a metaphor for a distant and uncaring God- ("Mirror-). Furthermore, in the second stanza she describes a lake which could also be considered a mirror if you look into it and see your reflection. So in the first stanza Plath is talking about an actual mirror that is reflecting the images, while in the second stanza she has changed it to a lake that is reflecting an image of a woman. With the beginning of the second stanza, the poem takes on a much darker tone, rather than the softer much more relaxed approach used in the first stanza. The change is abruptly signaled by the presentation of a different type of mirror, which is the reflective surface of a lake. "This recalls the mythological figure Narcissus, who fell in love with his own refection in a lake and died as a result of this impossible infatuation- ("Mirror-). The importance of the mirror is so that you could look back at things and see yourself for who you really are when you are looking into it. "The woman who looks in the mirror every day has drowned a young girl in it and sees an old woman rising toward her like a terrible fish- (Hayman 164). Here Hayman is discussing how the mirror reminds the old woman that her years have past, and the lady doesn't seem to like that idea because she sees her reflection as an ugly, helpless, terrible fish.
