For eight lines, the speaker of «The mirror» seems to be a bystander watching a stranger cry. We get a tear, full eyes, a mouth that cannot hold a smile. Then the poem turns on its pronoun: "I want to touch her." The final line, "But my fingers just touch the mirror," gives away what the title already hinted at. The sad girl is the speaker's own reflection. The poem is about heartbreak, but also about the odd loneliness of heartbreak, the way pain can make us split in two, one self that suffers and another that wants to rescue it, with a pane of glass between them.
The construction depends on withholding. Until line nine there is no "I", only "she" and "her", so we read with the tenderness we would give a character we pity. When the speaker finally appears, the distance collapses. The poem has been a confession all along, told as if about someone else. Speaking of herself in the third person may be how this speaker manages to look at the pain at all.
The imagery is small and physical: a tear, eyes, a mouth, fingers. Nothing is described at length, and the poem never leaves the face. This makes sense in a mirror, where the face is all you can see, and the face is where feeling shows. Each body part also gets its own small failure. The eyes are "full with feelings", too full to be useful. The mouth "tries to smile" and cannot. The fingers reach and are stopped. The vocabulary stays plain and a little unpolished. "She got a broken heart" is blunter than a more ornamental phrase would be, and it sounds like something said aloud, not performed.
The most unsettling idea comes in the middle: "She needs a hug. / By the person who did this to her." The comfort she wants can only come from the one who caused the hurt, and "Love and sadness", set together on one short line, shows why. The two feelings are not separated into stages. They sit side by side, and the line gives neither more room than the other. One way to read the mirror is that the speaker is still waiting for an absent person to repair what they broke. Another is that the speaker half-blames herself. The poem does not decide, and the ambiguity is part of its honesty.
Rhyme plays no part here. "Face", "feelings", "heart", "hug" and "smile" do not echo one another, which suits a poem about something unresolved. The rhythm comes from the shortness of the sentences. Most lines are complete statements, often fragments, and each lands with a small stop. "Love and sadness." "But she fails." The pace changes at the turn: "I want to touch her, / Tell her, / Everything will be okay." The commas and the stepped lines read like a person gathering courage, trying to say the comforting thing before it fades. "Everything will be okay" is the only line that looks to the future, and its hopefulness makes the ending hit harder.
Two lines begin with "But", and the echo is deliberate. "But she fails" describes the smile. "But my fingers just touch the mirror" describes the comfort. The smile fails because it is forced, and the comfort fails because the reflection is only an image. In both cases the wish is clear and the result falls short. The word "just" carries a lot of weight in that last line, because the speaker can reach as far as the glass and no further. The surface that lets her see herself also stops her from helping herself.
The poem is significant because it does so much in so little space. It follows a familiar situation, crying in front of a mirror, but turns it into a small drama of self-compassion: the wish to say "everything will be okay" to yourself, and the difficulty of believing it. It does not give the reassurance it imagines. It ends on the cold glass and lets us feel how far one person can be from her own comfort, which is why its quiet ending stays with the reader.