Naked Girl And Mirror - Analysis

A self that thought it could stay weightless

Judith Wright’s poem stages a fierce, intimate argument between a consciousness that wants to be pure motion and a body that insists on being real. The speaker begins by denying the reflected figure: This is not I. That denial isn’t simple vanity; it’s a grief-struck refusal of limitation. The earlier self she remembers was almost bodiless: only what served my need to laugh and run, to stare at stars, to tentatively dance at the edge of foam and wave and sand and sun. The diction makes the past feel airy and ungraspable, as if the speaker’s true identity were a kind of element—something lived on a shoreline’s “fringe,” never pinned down.

The poem’s central claim, then, is brutal: growing into a sexual, gendered body feels like being captured by a stranger, even when that stranger is beautiful. The mirror doesn’t just show change; it imposes it.

The mirror as trap and courtroom

The first big tension arrives in the line Can I be trapped in that soft face. The face is “soft,” not monstrous; the trap is gentleness itself. The mirror becomes a courtroom where the speaker is both judge and defendant, forced to decide whether the body counts as “I.” Even in the early memory, other people already tried to locate her: Eyes loved, hands reached. But she says I was gone, riding my own currents, a self compared to quicksilver and thistledown—materials that won’t hold still in the hand.

Now, stillness is mandatory. The mirror makes her look, and looking becomes captivity: she must confront a self she can’t out-run.

The body begs to be claimed

When the speaker addresses the reflection—I stare at you in fear—the poem reveals its strangest intimacy: the body can speak back. The reflected girl watches with immoderate plea, asking to be recognized: know me—be me. That plea turns the mirror into a mouthpiece for embodiment itself, as if flesh were demanding citizenship in the mind.

The details Wright chooses are deliberately tender and unsettling. The shoulders are smooth once—hermaphrodite, suggesting a moment before the body is fully sorted into adult sexual meaning, and then come the sudden shy curves furred with light. The speaker’s fear isn’t only about attractiveness; it’s about the way this new body announces fertility and desire without asking permission. The reflection is both innocent and charged, too tenderly formed, and that tenderness feels like coercion.

Optional intensification: who is the betrayer here?

The speaker calls it betrayal, but the poem keeps complicating who betrayed whom. Is the body the traitor for arriving, or is the mind the traitor for refusing to shelter what it created? When she says the girl waited between a year and a year, the body sounds like an inevitable appointment—one the speaker is angry to have kept.

“Betrayed by someone lovely”: hatred braided with awe

The poem’s tonal turn deepens when the speaker insists, No, I have been betrayed, and then sharpens the paradox: betrayed by someone lovely. She cannot deny beauty—I see you are lovely—and yet she answers it with hateful naked girl. The hatred here is defensive. If the girl is lovely, the speaker risks being obligated to her; if she can make the girl hateful, she can try to keep her freedom.

But the mirror won’t cooperate. The reflected mouth tremble[s], and the speaker’s refusal—I refuse / to know or claim you—produces immediate moral discomfort. The body appears almost as a dependent creature, wounded by neglect. Calling the girl not my own is a desperate legalism, as if identity could be solved by disowning.

The missing “other” and the threat of being only half

One of the poem’s most cutting ideas is that this body is not presented as complete in itself. The speaker tells the girl, You are half of some other who may never come. The “other” reads as a future lover, or “man,” or the social completion promised by romance; but it also reads as the adult self the speaker cannot yet imagine. Either way, the reflected girl is forced into waiting. She seek[s] that other, the speaker claims, and he will be your home—a line that makes heterosexual destiny sound like relocation, as if the body’s true address is elsewhere.

This sets up another tension: the speaker wants autonomy, yet she also imagines the body as designed for someone else’s arrival. That belief both excuses her rejection (it’s “not mine”) and intensifies her jealousy (it will belong to an “other”).

Pity, obedience, and the long resentment

The final stanza doesn’t resolve the conflict; it re-frames it as an uneasy contract. Yet I pity your eyes, she says, seeing them misted with tears, and the speaker leans toward a kind of reconciliation: I lean to your kiss. Still, the language of care is not affection but duty: I must serve you; I will obey. It’s a surrender that tastes like bitterness—she predicts Some day we may love, but even that hope is conditional and distant.

The closing lines keep the resentment alive: she will always resent the body’s dumb and fruitful years. “Fruitful” admits power—sexuality, fertility, desirability—while “dumb” names the body’s speechlessness compared to the mind’s articulate rage. And the final warning—Your lovers shall learn better if they think I am part of you—splits her in two again: the mind refuses to be reduced to the body’s romantic or sexual availability. The poem ends not with harmony but with a guarded boundary, as if the speaker can accept embodiment only by insisting that something in her will remain unpossessed.