Most mirror poems ask "who am I?" Peter John Dean's "Mirror, Mirror" starts from the answer "not this." Its opening statement, "Mirrored eyes / Aren't mine," is flat and almost defiant, and the rest of the poem is the speaker's attempt to act on that denial by frightening, banishing and finally withering the face that looks back.
The title sets a small trap. "Mirror, mirror" is the familiar fairy-tale chant of someone asking a looking-glass to confirm their beauty. Here the doubled word sounds more like a stammer, the repetition of someone who has stared at the glass too long. Nothing is asked of the mirror except that it stop.
The speaker's first move is to break the face into pieces. We get "eyes" and "mouth," each labelled "mirrored," and never a whole person. The mouth "opens dumbly / Like a phantom," and "dumbly" does two jobs. The mouth is silent, miming speech without sound, but it also looks slack and stupid. A phantom has a person's outline and no substance, and that is what unsettles the speaker: a reflection that copies every movement while saying nothing. The reply is the shortest, hardest line so far, "I destroy you." It has three beats and no qualification, and it is the only place in the poem where "I" is the grammatical subject of an action.
After that the poem loses its footing. "In the darkness / Mirror face / Where are you?" When the light goes, the reflection vanishes and the threat has nowhere to land. The question is oddly anxious, even tender. The speaker has just wished the face away and now cannot find it. Notice also that "mirrored" has become "mirror," so the face is no longer a face that happens to be reflected but something made of the glass itself.
The tone then changes again, from argument to ritual. "Make a pass before the mirror / To dispel reflected terror." These are the longest lines in the poem, and they fall into a steady, chant-like beat. They also carry the poem's first clear rhyme, mirror and terror, which makes them sound like a formula. The vocabulary belongs to magic. "Make a pass" suggests a conjurer's sweep of the hand, and "dispel" is what one does to spells and spirits. The phrase "reflected terror" is itself double-edged, since the terror may belong to the image or may be the speaker's own fear thrown back at him.
The voice has also become an impersonal command. Who is being told to make the pass? The likeliest answer is the speaker's own self, now split into one part that orders and one that obeys. That split explains why "you" is so slippery. In the first stanza it is the reflection, but in the final lines, "Let it shrivel up / Before you," it is hard to say who stands in front of whom. The poem ends on the same word with which it made its threat, so the destroyer and the destroyed seem folded into one figure.
The couplet "In it place / Another's face" snaps shut like a charm, with its own rhyme and its slightly archaic "in it place" in place of the everyday "in its place." The wish is not to see no face at all, only to see a different one. Then comes "shrivel," a physical, almost botanical word, like a leaf curling in the heat. The pronoun "it" is ambiguous, because the nearest noun is "Another's face." The poem leaves open whether the old reflection or its replacement is meant to wither, or whether any face the speaker sees will end up condemned.
The form supports all of this. The lines are tiny, the punctuation is sparse, and the white space between stanzas works like held breath, so the poem feels like a mumbled incantation in a dark bathroom. Rhyme arrives late and only in patches, as though order comes only once the spell begins.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. The mirror stops being a neutral object and becomes an opponent, and the horror is not a monster from outside but the speaker's own face, which no longer feels like his. The poem never tells us whether the ritual works, and that uncertainty is what stays with the reader.