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The Face In The Mirror Sylvia Plath Analysis

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“The Face in the Mirror” is a poem written by English poet Robert Graves in 1957. It talks about a man’s perspective of aging. “Mirror” is a poem written by Sylvia Plath in 1961 and tells us about how a woman perceives aging. Both have a similar theme, rhyme, and a sad tone. They also differ in theme, rhyme type and rhyme scheme, and tone. The first similarities and differences between these poems are found in their theme. Both “The Face in the Mirror” and “Mirror” tell us that old age is not as bad as it appears to be and that the passage of time is not always cruel. This theme is evident in the lines, “He still stands ready,” (Graves line 14) and, “I am not cruel, only truthful,” (Plath line 4). However, each poem also has its own separate additional theme. A theme found in “The Face in the Mirror” is that a person’s exterior does not always reflect their interior. An example of this is, “He still stands ready, with a boy’s presumption, to court the …show more content…

Besides these similarities, the poems also differ in their themes, structures, and tones. The themes of the poems helped me realize that old age is not as terrible as it seems and that looking old does not mean we are also decaying on the inside. The structures of the poems allowed me to understand that they were chosen to maintain the flow of the words as well as to communicate the poems’ meanings in the best possible way. The tones of the poems reinforced what I know to be true about the different ways men and women view aging, with men not being very affected and women despairing. All of these separate inferences enabled me to conclude that all people view aging differently, though the majority of each gender feels one way, and that no matter how young you may feel on the inside, a part of you will always feel sad about the passage of

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