Mirrors often show up in poetry in symbolic roles, as self-knowledge, distortion, doubles, and thresholds. Let's look at some varied approaches to the mirror in poetry.
"Mirror" by Sylvia Plath is probably the most famous “mirror poem.” The mirror speaks here in a cold, objective voice: “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.”
It becomes a symbol of unyielding truth, especially as a woman ages and confronts her changing identity. The mirror is not comforting; it is brutally honest, almost inhuman.
An early example is "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The lady of the poem lives under a curse and can only see the world through a mirror, never directly. Today, we might call this mediated reality. When she turns away from it to look directly, her world collapses. This poem explores the danger of moving from **illusion into reality**, and the cost of authentic experience.
I have always loved the mirror as a portal or threshold in Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Okay, it is prose, but Lewis Carroll embedded poems in the book. He treats the mirror as a passage into an inverted world. That is a classic metaphor for crossing into the unconscious or the surreal.
What we see when we look in a mirror might be an uncanny double. "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa is set at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is a reflective black surface. The speaker sees his own face merge with the names of the dead. That mix - “I’m stone. I’m flesh” mixes past and present, self and ghost.
Send us a poem that uses mirrors in some symbolic way.
Submission Deadline: June 30, 2026
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"The Poet Laureate", caricature of Tennyson in Vanity Fair, 1871
Do people still read the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson? I'm not sure if he is even read in K-12 English classrooms these days. I read him in high school and had a course in college in the 1970s that assigned us Idylls of the King. I enjoyed the cycle of twelve narrative poems which retells the legend of King Arthur, his knights, his love for Guinevere and her tragic betrayal of him, and the rise and fall of Arthur's kingdom. I was taking another course on Arthurian literature and it all made sense.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) was the Poet Laureate from 1850. Idylls of the King was published between 1859 and 1885.
Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire, England in 1809 and showed early promise as a poet. I don't know how good it is but he wrote a 6,000-line epic when he was only 12. He published a book of poetry with his brother when he was only 17.
He had to leave Cambridge because of his father's death. He published some poetry and got some particularly negative reviews. Then, his best friend died and Tennyson fell into a period of depression. "I suffered what seemed to me to shatter all my life so that I desired to die rather than to live," he said of that time He refused to publish anything for ten years.
When he finally put out his next book, simply titled Poems, it established his career immediately and brilliantly. He went on to succeed William Wordsworth as Britain's poet laureate, and Queen Victoria conferred on him the title of baron, arguably making him the first poet ever to sit in the House of Lords based solely on the merit of his verse. His fame at the time was probably only eclipsed by that of the prime minister and the queen herself.
But I don't think he is read much anymore except for some anthologized poems that turn up in a high school Brit Lit course or in a college survey class.
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This spring, I am the "poet in residence" at a middle school. It is fun to be back in a classroom, especially since I am only there once a week and only for an hour. The students have sessions where we write, revise, and listen to each other's poems.
There are three "events" where they can read their best poem aloud. One is performance-oriented, but the other two are just readings and it is quite a thing to be that age and be able to stand in front of a crowd and read aloud. Some will memorize. Some will add some performance, but I'm impressed with any of them reading something they wrote aloud at that age.
My own first reading at an open mic in a bookstore happened in high school and before I read my knees were very literally shaking and I had to hold onto the podium to keep my hands still.
Having heard actors and poets read some poems on recordings, my idea of "how to read a poem aloud" was rather distorted. I knew I couldn't read like Richard Burton, but I thought that kind of reading should be my model.
Of course, you don't need celebrities to have a good reading of a poem, but actor John Lithgow put together The Poets' Corner a collection of well-known poems and had them read by a group of celebrities. The readings are online.
I listened to the collection and it brought back memories of poems read or heard when I was a young student discovering poetry. It includes Wallace Stevens's poem "The Emperor of Ice Cream" (read by Kathy Bates) which was a poem that grabbed me in high school with its title and language.
There are many collections of poets and others reading online. You could spend days going from one to another on YouTube alone. I share some of these with students because hearing poetry read aloud is not a commonplace event for most people. young or old.
The students read their poems too quickly. They try to memorize rather than "learn by heart" their poems - a difference that is not easy to understand or learn. Some over-dramatize. They use their "poet voice" in the way that novice Shakespearean actors drift into British accents - even when Romeo is Italian or Twelfth Night takes place in Illyria (Yugoslavia) and Hamlet and his friends are from Denmark.
It is rare to see a poet (or any writer, though non-fiction writers and novelists get more airplay) interviewed on TV - even rarer to hear poetry read. I was happily surprised when actress Helen Mirren was asked by Stephen Colbert to read the end of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” on his show. (read "Ulysses") It is an old poem and apparently, one Colbert has great affection for.
“Death closes all: but something ere the end
Some work of noble note, may yet be done…”
That section of Tennyson's poem - hopeful that some work might still be done - reminds me of the Epilogue to Shakespeare's The Tempest. Prospero, a wizard and an old man, gives this final speech and I have always thought of it as Shakespeare's own farewell/retirement speech. He asks that the audience "release me from my bands, with the help of your good hands." The two times I have seen the play performed, after that line the audience did, with its applause, free him. Shakespeare's "project" - "which was to please" is finished.
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
I think that many of my young poets, like Prospero and Shakespeare, want "spirits to enforce, art to enchant." I hope they get that, if only for a few minutes when they read and are freed by the audience's hands.
