In “Mirror,” poet Sylvia Plath skillfully mixes a number of metaphors into the text along with the major literary device she employs, personification. As the speaker is a mirror, many of the features it (or perhaps she) uses to express aspects of identity or action are metaphors, or direct comparisons of apparently unlike things.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god. . . .
The mirror-speaker is not a god’s eye, so saying “I am . . . the eye . . .” is a metaphor.
In the second stanza, “I am a lake” is both a metaphor and personification. Because a lake can function as a mirror, the poet may be introducing a different personification.
In saying that the “woman . . . has drowned a young girl,” the poet offers another metaphor, this time for aging. Aging can metaphorically be called killing one’s younger self. The final comparison, “like a fish," is a simile, a comparison using like or as.
When writers use metaphors, they use non-literal language to make connections between two things that aren't otherwise connected.
For example, imagine you said, "He's a dog." You're referring to a man with no standards. He's not literally a dog. He's human.
In "Mirror," Plath definitely uses metaphors. There are a number in the poem.
Take the first few lines as examples:
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.Whatever I see I swallow immediatelyJust as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
If the speaker is the mirror, then it is not literally true that it swallows things. Images of things pass into mirrors like they are being swallowed, though, and that's the connection. Likewise, mirrors do mist, but the literal mist is water condensing on them. Here, "unmisted by love or dislike" is a metaphor for being emotionally unmoved, or objective. That's how mirrors see things.
https://literarydevices.net/metaphor/
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