The personified mirror is “silver” (in appearance) and “exact” (it reflects the image accurately). By itself the mirror does what it is supposed to do, it mirrors. Not being opinionated, it is unbiased, reflecting the image exactly as it is.
Traditionally the poem has been considered to deal with the subjects of time and appearance; and the female narcissistic trauma for beauty and youth robbed by time. Worried about the signs of age, the speckles and wrinkles appearing on her face, she temporarily seeks solace as “she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon”, only to turn back to the mirror who reflects her faithfully.
However, in a metaphoric shift, the mirrors becomes a lake where the woman has drowned a young girl, and like a terrible fish, an old woman rises towards her. Here the mirror becomes a more complex entity than a neutral reflector of images. If the ‘old woman’ is the present truth, there is no point in reminding the drowned young girl, unless there is a tacit politics of comparison involved here. It is the sheer commercialization of the female body which is valuable until it is young.
Hence, the truthful “eye of a little god” that the mirror claims to be his, is the gaze of the chauvinist male (‘god’) that defines the truth about female body and her identity. The first stanza of the poem thus appears to be the solidification of a patriarchal order that dictates truth and objectivity for the woman, herself torn between what the society expects to her as a wife or mother, and her own quest to find her identity as an individual or an artist.
