Anyone who has stood at the edge of still water at dusk knows the odd little shock of it: the world seems to have been duplicated, and the copy is upside down. Bennett Chapple's "Mirrors" is a poem about exactly that moment, and about the delight of stepping into it. Its central idea is simple but pleasing: when the water is calm enough, the boundary between above and below dissolves, and a boat ride becomes a kind of flight.
The poem moves like a short voyage. The first stanza sets the scene with twilight "a-creeping" across a "quiet bay," and the old-fashioned "a-creeping" gives the evening a soft, stealthy, almost animal movement. By the end of the stanza the water has "turn[ed] to mirrors," and notice the plural. Chapple doesn't say the bay becomes one mirror; it becomes many, as if every patch of surface were its own glass. The "deep shadows" that "play" in them are a nice touch too, since play suggests something light and mobile, not gloomy. Twilight here is not threatening but mischievous.
In the second stanza the reflection takes over the scene. "The trees are all turned upside down," says the poet, in a plain, matter-of-fact sentence that makes the strange fact feel almost comic. Then the detail sharpens: "Inverted ferns and bushes / Are hanging from the ledge." The word "hanging" is clever, because it is exactly what the reflected plants appear to do, dangling down into the water like bats or laundry. Chapple is looking closely here, picking out small things like ferns, not just grand ones like trees.
The third stanza is where the poem's imagination really opens up. The "colored rocks build highways / With grand and sloping sides," a lovely image in which the reflected shoreline becomes a road leading downward, and the verb "build" gives the reflection a kind of solidity and purpose. Then comes the poem's finest picture: "o'er a sea of fleecy clouds / The boat serenely glides." The clouds, reflected in the water, are now beneath the boat, and "fleecy" makes them soft and woolly, something you could sink into. "Serenely" slows the line down, matching the boat's calm drift. Notice how the stanza stacks one metaphor on another: rocks are highways, water is sea, sea is cloud. The reflection keeps transforming into something new.
The final stanza turns from description to feeling, and from watching to participating. "It is a grand sensation / To sail this magic sea" is the poem's one direct statement of delight, and "magic" is the key word: the bay has become an enchanted place. Then Chapple saves his best trick for the last two lines: "For all the time you're looking down / You're looking up, by gee!" The paradox is the whole poem in miniature. The sudden "by gee!" is deliberately casual, a burst of boyish wonder that breaks the stately tone and makes the speaker sound like someone genuinely surprised, not someone performing poetry.
Formally, the poem is built to feel as smooth as its subject. Each stanza is four lines, with the second and fourth rhyming (bay/play, edge/ledge, sides/glides, sea/gee), so the sound pattern gently closes each stanza like a ripple settling. The rhythm is a light, bouncing beat of roughly three stresses a line, close to the feel of a nursery song or a ballad, which suits the childlike openness of the subject. Even the vocabulary is simple and concrete: bay, trees, rocks, boat. The magic comes from how things are seen, not from fancy words.
What makes "Mirrors" worth reading is its reminder that wonder doesn't require anything exotic. A quiet bay, a boat and the right hour of the evening are enough to turn the ordinary world inside out. The poem teaches a habit of attention, and its last line, with its cheerful paradox, shows how good that habit can feel.