A middle-aged man tells us he has stopped really looking at himself in the mirror. He glances at it only to brush his teeth or shave, and what he notices is plain and unflattering: a bald head, a heavy dark face, yellowing teeth, graying stubble. He says he has known his own face for fifty years and more, so there is nothing left to learn from it.
The tone is dry and weary at first, almost matter-of-fact. Then it shifts. Now and then his eyes catch his own eyes, and the look is tired, watery, "dead." In that moment the reflection seems to become someone else, a "he" who quietly asks why the speaker let life slip away. The question is not angry, but it stings, because it comes from himself.
The mood is one of regret and quiet self-reproach. The poem suggests that the real reason he avoids the mirror is not vanity but the fear of facing an unlived life.