"Mirror" is written in the voice of the mirror, which is "unguarded by love or dislike...The eye of a little god, four-cornered." It sees "her back, and reflect[s] it faithfully." The first part of this poem is factual. When Plath says "But it flickers./Faces and darkness separate us over and over," the reader gains a sense of dimming light. In the second stanza, one learns the dim "candles or the moon" are "liars," and Plath greets the mirror with "tears and an agitation of hands." Perhaps she feels herself age "day after, like a terrible fish." Fish, by the way, could be interpreted as a derogatory term attached to the female gender.
"Morning Song" seems to describe an alienated sense of motherhood. The poem is about the birth of her daughter, Frieda, but leaves a cold sense, as the marble statuette image of a child: new, to be ogled by any joyful onlooker. But this poem lacks some matronly sense, the mothering instinct: loving and tender, even protective. Plath's daughter, said Plath, was brought into the world out of love, but the following quote is truly disturbing:
"I'm no more your mother/Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow/Effacement at the wind's hand."
The sea is what she heard first in "Morning Song," and perhaps she wished she was elsewhere for one short moment. She looked at the light of day creeping in her window, which "swallows its dull stars." Dull could represent the drudgery of family life, as typical as a child's wails in the morning, sounding song-like in high notes while "clear vowels rise like balloons." This poem becomes a moment in mundane routine after birth, and can be seen as hinting at postpartum depression. Such weight carries motherhood, for one woman in a “Victorian nightgown,” expected to be so much.
A non-sympathetic reader might fling an insult, labeling her "spinster," but she beat the critics to it. In "Spinster" we see two seasons: Spring (which is messy, burgeoning, giddy, and confusing as love); and winter (with its orderly discipline, ice and rock "exact as a snowflake"). Plath decided that only idiots truly love,
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