Venus at the Mirror
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.
In "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" by Anne Sexton, she rewrites the fairy tale, focusing on the mirror as an instrument of patriarchal judgment and female self-surveillance.
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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