Mirrors and Windows

One of my favourite Paul Muldoon poems, 'The Mirror', relates the death of the narrator's father, a 'remote figure in his Sunday best / who was buried the next day'. It imagines that a looking glass in his old house was to blame:

I didn’t realize till two days later
it was the mirror took his breath away.
The monstrous old Victorian mirror
with the ornate gilt frame
we had found in the three-storey house
when we moved in from the country.
I was afraid it would sneak
down from the wall and swallow me up
in one gulp in the middle of the night...

I'm always fascinated by images of mirrors and windows in poems, perhaps because poems themselves often seem to act as mirrors or windows.Some poems are a glass held up to the poet's face, showing us more of them than they perhaps realise. I'm thinking of a slant self-portrait such as Hugo Williams' 'The White Hair', where the narrator stands in front of the mirror, wishing he could get rid of a memory as easily as a stray hair. Others are windows, letting us look past the poem to a world beyond, like Norman MacCaig's evocations of landscapes that defy human comparison. In his poem 'Humanism', even to relate a natural phenomenon to the world we recognise is arrogance:

What a human lie is this. What greed and what
Arrogance, not to allow
A glacier to be a glacier –
To humanise into metaphor
That long slither of ice…

The poem: mirror or window?

When we read a poem, are we looking for our own face or someone else's? Are we looking for a human face at all? There's been plenty of previous discussion on this blog about mirror neurons, empathy and poetry: the idea that our neural capacity to imitate and enact the experience of others might relate to our desire to see experience reflected in poetry. A.S. Byatt has written about mirror neurons in relation to the work of John Donne, suggesting that his poems are so sensuous because they invite this capacity to enact their movements, almost as if we're inhabiting another body.

But poetry is often connected to selfishness as much as empathy. Poets are accused of being narcissists more often than they're hailed as altrusits. A fascinating notebook essay in 'Poetry' by Joshua Mehigan explores the connections between poetry and mental illness (another popular topic on this blog) and touches on the idea of self-obsession:

"I’m proud, I hope not inordinately proud, to say that I rate below average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Then again, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which can include deficits in empathy and introspection, isn’t usually what people mean when they say “narcissist.” Most probably mean “self-centered asshole,” and, if I’m honest, I must sadly own up to matching that description for straight years at a time. Again, the private consequences partly account for my wish to avoid the mistake in poems. A close friend, also a poet, once asked me why I write poetry, and I replied that, among other things, it gives me a chance to make my narcissism palatable to others. She laughed. Her husband laughed. It was no joke. It seems to me that narcissism is ineluctably at the heart of poetry, maybe of every human enterprise. One-third of people will think I’m an idiot for bothering to state this. Two-thirds will think I’m repugnant for suggesting that poetry isn’t soul magic. But, however magical your soul, doesn’t its unveiling imply a touch of egotism? In lyric poetry, especially, some degree of narcissism seems unavoidable. Even Dickinson and Hopkins sought readers at some point. Now let us observe a moment’s silence for the Unknown Poets, who have defeated narcissism and won oblivion. Then, since there’s nothing to build on there, let us quickly turn in gratitude to their egotistical fellow poets, who reached through self-regard to give the bitter world a little beauty and insight."

Are poets merely obsessed with their own reflection? Might that narcissism be necessary, as Mehigan suggests, to achieve 'beauty and insight'? Do they help us see ourselves in their poems by reflecting their own selves doggedly? My earlier dichotomy is, of course, far too simple. The best poems are both windows and mirrors. If they function as mirrors, then like the looking glass in 'Alice in Wonderland', they suggest a world beyond them, one that could swallow us at any moment. If they are windows we can see through, they're windows at night, in which we also catch a reflection of ourselves.

This is certainly true of Joshua Mehigan's own work. Centring around moments of assumed personal significance, his deft, formal poems often achieve their generality by a kind of specificness, or vice versa. Perhaps a more appropriate metaphor for the poem is not the window or the mirror, but something else entirely - the humble bath sponge. Here's a poem by Mehigan from 'Poetry', June 2006

The Sponge

None of us understands our story better
than this nonentity, unconscious slip
of nature, nonetheless our common parent
dilating at the bottom of the sea.

The parent, too, of octopus and pony,
of reefs and villages, once it was strange
simply for being not a rock itself—
not rock, but a blank sleep on a rock shelf.

And, deeply sympathetic to the rock,
to sea and sea-dust washing through its skin,
it knows, although it doesn’t know it knows,
that minds and their milieux are all one thing.

Some see its way of thinking; most, not yet.
Still, one day, just by living, all will find
reason enough within themselves to think
the single thought forever in its mind.