‘questions About Identity Underpin Much Of Poetry.’ In Response To This View, Explore Connections Between The Ways Hughes And Plath Write About Identity.

Identity is a theme often explored by many different poets, including both Hughes and Plath. In Plath s poem mirror, identity is explored through the representation of oneself through their appearance and how others perceive them. The speaker of this poem is a mirror. It begins by saying that it does not have a preconceived idea of what it s looking at: it will take in and reflect exactly what it sees, and will not be affected by how much it hates or loves you. The mirror reflects the truth. This line, and the poem as a whole, could also reflect the numbness that resulted from Plath s severe depression: she became unable to feel anything, let alone love or hate anything. The line eye of a little god insinuates that the mirror is like the eye of a god. It sees people for what they really are. Like God, the mirror is omniscient, as it is able to see and reflect the truth. You can t hide yourself from its gaze. The lack of a capitalization in god suggests that it could even be &any &god, not just God Himself. The first sentence of the second stanza alludes to the mirror changing its form from an enduring wall into the essentially transient horizontal lake. A change in visual state is only possible for the omnipresent mirror. This change of state alludes to the overarching theme effect of senescence on youth. Plath alludes here to the &myth of Echo and Narcissus, showing how people can become obsessed with searching for themselves in a mirror as Narcissus became obsessed with his own reflection in a lake. In the final two lines of the poem, When the woman looks into the mirror, she wants to see her beauty from years past. However, she is not able to because the mirror is simply truthful and can t bring back the young girl who once looked in. Like a terrible fish is a simile through which the woman is reflected as her current age, rather than the beautiful young girl she once was. The comparison illustrates the horror the woman feels in growing old. She may also be saying that the woman has wasted her life as a narcissist, spending large amounts of time peering at her reflection, and becomes distraught as she realizes that her beauty is fading.

Whilst Mirror focuses on the shallower aspects to identity, such as physical appearance. Ted Hughes introduces Wodwo making it the titular poem of the collection published in 1967. The Wodwo was a link between civilized humans and the dangerous elf-like spirits of natural woodland. Therefore, the term Wodwo is indeed emblematic as it stands for the state of Identity Crisis as the Wodwo stands between two worlds, as he is in quest for his roots. As the proverbial Wodwo , he is caught between instinct and reason, myth and reality, freedom and rootedness. The Wodwo probes his roots at the very outset as he asserts What am I? Note that he uses what instead of Who pointing to animal and vegetative qualities. He seems to be nosing here or rather meddling with affairs that are not essentially his. Therefore, he feels to be divorced from that place. The action of turning leaves over is also a pursuit in search for himself. It follows a faint stain to the river s edge with the hope of locating something meaningful. The Wodwo does not hold the sure stance or the arrogant stand of the Hawk in Hughes s Hawk Roosting . Neither does it possess the single-minded killer-instinct of Hughes Pike It is confused, and has no feeling of belonging. Furthermore, he feels himself to be separate from the ground& he is not just rooted, but dropped. The action of not being rooted signifies that he did not belong to the ground even in the past. He seems to be dropped as if out of nowhere. It seems to have no threads to link him. It appears he has been given the freedom of the place& however, it is this freedom that lends him disorientation-as he does not know where he belongs to, he cannot explore his roots. The rotten stump comes across a metaphor for his base: picking off bits of bark gives him no pleasure. The Wodwo is not addressing the reader. Rather, the poem shows the stream of consciousness of the Wodwo. It mumbles to itself in the way that very young children or old people sometimes do, talking themselves through the processes of living and thinking. Wodwo is a poem of twenty-eight lines written in free verse. The poet is writing in the first person but in the persona of the Wodwo, which he describes in his essay Learning to Think (Poetry Is, 1970) as some sort of goblin creature- a sort of half-man half-animal spirit of the forests.