Mirror

biography

• Encouraged by her mother.
• First poem published when 8 years old.
• Mental breakdown when moved back to home.
• Married Ted Hughes in 1956.
• Kills herself in 1963.

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• I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
• Whatever I see I swallow immediately
• Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
• I am not cruel, only truthful---
• The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

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• Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
• It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
• I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
• Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

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• Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
• Searching my reaches for what she really is.
• Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
• I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
• She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

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• I am important to her. She comes and goes.
• Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
• In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
• Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.