"Mirror & "Wodwo" Jacks

Extended metaphor — personification

• The poem follows a seemingly omniscient narrator of a personified mirror

Motif of declaratives

• The mirror creates a tone of objective judgement & certainty through a pattern of declarative simple sentences such as “I am silver and exact”. The predatory power of it is also foreshadowed here — “Whatever I see I swallow immediately”

Imagery of darkness

• The mirror appears bitter, calling candles and the moon “liars”

• It also says that her face “replaces the darkness” every morning

• Darkness is often a symbol of disillusion or derealisation in Plath’s poetry — this semantic field may therefore convey that the woman’s identity is shrouded by darkness due to its inextricable ties to her appearance — she therefore consoles herself within it rather than facing the stark brightness/honesty of the mirror

Lake metaphor

• The mirror transfigures into a lake over which a woman bends — “searching my reaches for what she really is” — this may allude to the Greek myth of Narcissus, who is drowned by a nymph by contemplating his own appearance. However, Plath doesn’t pass the same judgement as this myth — instead she seems to lament the act

Simile & zoomorphism & future

• The woman is placed in the active voice as the subject and the mirror as the object in the sentence “in me she has drowned a young girl” — this flips the previously established power dynamics which may be a lament on how women lose their youth to this obsession

• This fearful obsession is replicated in the simile “an old woman rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish” — this unusual zoomorphic simile highlights the discomfort women feel regarding the ageing process

Ariel (1965)

• Declarative tone

• Two stanzas — both nine lines — mirror — reality from her and the mirror’s perspective. Exact, like the mirror.

• Motif of darkness

• Eyes/vision as metaphors for power

• Modernism — experimental structure and feminist message

• Absurdism — questions the value of appearances

• She quotes Betty Friedan who suggests that after WWII ideas surrounding women returned to Victorian ideology — i.e., women should be innocent and submissive & are defined by their capacity to procreate. This may link to disillusionment with such qualities of femininity which Plath also explores in poems such as Morning Song

The mirror becomes “an agent of anxious narcissism”

Lack of punctuation

• Beyond the repeated question marks in the poem, little to no punctuation is used to create breaks or pauses and sentences spill across the lines of the poem in haphazard lengths — this creates a fast pace and frenzied tone

Motif of interrogatives

• This poem seems to pose the intrinsic question of “What am I?” with which it is first introduced — uncertainty is the emotion that pioneers Hughes’ Wodwo to create a narrative

Repetition & pastoral imagery

• Frenzy is also seen in repeated phrases such as “what shape am I what shape am I”, “past these trees and past these trees” and “roots roots roots roots”, which seems to mirror an attempt to anchor one’s identity in the natural landscape in order to find relatability — roots may be a pun as it is often used with the pragmatic implication of one’s personal history

Allusion to the future

• The poem concludes on an optimistic note “again very queer but I’ll go on looking” — this uses the present progressive tense and aspect to indicate the hunt for identity is limitless & depicts the spirit as profoundly curious — perhaps this is the nature of identity

• However this questioning of how the Wodwo ties itself in with nature may be Hughes questioning his previous philosophies — he can no longer see himself plainly within nature

Wodwo (1967)

• Interrogative tone

• Enjambment

• Eye symbolism/ vision — “go on looking” = strive for power

• Figurehead of nature is still used

• Modernism: stream-of-consciousness technique

• Romanticism — subliminality of nature

• Birthday Letters (1998)

• The Wodwo collection was composed after 3 years since Plath’s suicide where he did not write anything. In it, he tends to ask the question “What am I?” — this poem explores his fatherhood

• Hughes described the Wodwo collection as a descent into madness

• Hughes on Shamanism & man’s reconciliation with nature

Hughes' belief that poetry has become the secular healing substitute for organized religion

• They are very different in grammatical tone

• Plath seems to have a more macrocosmic identity focus while Hughes moreso explores himself (extrospection vs introspection)

• Plath is atypically more violent than Hughes in this poetic pair

• Political versus philosophical didactic objectives