Abstract

Halliday regards style as meaning potential or motivated prominence, and the nature of style can be interpreted from functional point of view. Motivated prominence is fore grounded by deflection and incongruity, which are very common in poetry. The paper conducts a stylistic analysis on Plath’s poem Mirror. Plath is a famous confessional poetry, and Mirror is her famous work. The paper firstly discusses the Plath’s background of growth briefly, global structure and local structure of Mirror, and then explores the linguistic features from phonological level, graphological level, lexical level and grammatical level based on deflection and incongruity, and lastly analyzes its social functions from its function of appreciation and its function of metaphorizing the world to show the beauty of the poem and the meanings of the poem. Through brief analysis, it finds that prominence reinforces the theme of Mirror, and makes the poem more educational and beautiful. Besides, stylistic analysis will help readers understand the poem and its poet more subjectively.