Anne Sexton Mirror Analysis

Salvia Plath and Anne sexton were considered to be one of the major poets in the confessional poetry field. The common between both female poets is that they both suffered from depression and received a psychiatric treatment in specialized hospitals; in addition they both committed suicide, the similarity in their life events and the way of death presents also on the themes they decided to express in their poetry, sense confessional poetry deals dramatically with the poets' biography. Their poems dealt with several issues such as family, relationships, motherhood, and self-exploration and many others, and one of the interesting things those female poets dealt with is the use of mirror as a metaphor in Mirror by Plath and For John, Who Begs

Plath through the poem is trying to find her identity and therefore she is searching for her own reflections in order to be able to figure who she is. Since the poem is a confessional poem, the woman in the poem could be Plath, and the reflection of her could be her mental illness that she constantly transfers to from her normal state. when a mirror reflects your image, it is no longer known whether you reflect yourself on the mirror or it simply reveals your reflection, and through this poem, it sense that Plath it trying to figure this out, whether poetry reveals the reality of her inner side expose her to the outside, or she express her inner though confessing herself into

Her mind is her safe and peaceful place she can resort to, in her mind there is a cracked mirror and there is a kind of completion that who will out stare who. It is an interesting use of the mirror here, because we have a cracked mirror, and we don’t know whether the mirror is actually cracked, or it is simply reflecting Sexton's crackers. she is saying that her selfish dead, her outcome poetry, it is like when she is creating poetry it is dies when it exposed outside her, outstared her in the mirror, her poetry observed her, revealed her. There is the notion of the selfish poetry here, that when writing poetry it becomes a selfish act because it just reflects the poet's own experience, but Sexton through the poem is going against this notion, especially at the last two lines "my kitchen, your kitchen, my face, your face" she is saying what I reveal through my poetry, in the moment it came out of me I share it with you, it is no longer a monopoly on