"Cut"   by Sylvia Plath

   The poem “Cut” by Sylvia Plath is about a woman who accidently cuts her own thumb while in the kitchen chopping onions. Plath uses imagery throughout the whole poem. After the first stanza, Plath stops talking about just what has happened and starts going about what the cut looks like and the blood. After the fourth stanza, she begins to talk about her self-hate and how she is disgusted with herself.          

   Plath uses a lot of imagery in this “Cut”. She uses some personification and similes but the poem is primarily made up of metaphors. The first image used is a simile which is “a flap like a hat”. The poet uses this metaphor to create an image of the hinge of skin on her thumb. Plath uses some interesting metaphors in the poem to describe the blood coming from her thumb. These include “your turkey wattle” which describes the thick red colour of the blood and “carpet rolls” which creates and image for the intense bleeding. In my opinion, the best metaphor used by the poet to create an image for the bleeding is at the end of the fourth stanza where she writes “out of a gap a million soldiers run, redcoats, everyone.”

   The mood of this poem changes all over the place which makes the poem all the more enjoyable for the reader. In the first stanza, the mood is exiting when she starts the poem off with “What a thrill- my thumb instead of an onion”. This technique Plath uses catches the reader’s attention and is a good start to a poem. From the start of stanza three, Plath creates a violent tone. All of a sudden in the fourth stanza, the tone changes to happy and cheerful. “Clutching my bottle of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.” Then at the start of the fifth stanza, she is feeling pain and the tone is very dark. “I have taken a pill to kill”. The same dark  tone carries on to the next stanza when she is comparing the situation to a “Kamikaze man”. Once again, the tone changes in stanza seven where the poet goes back to describing the cut. “The stain on your Gauze Ku Klux Klan Babushka.” She also describes the pain she is experiencing when she mentions “The pulp of your heart”. Finally, in the last stanza, the poet turns to self-hate because of what she has done to herself. “Dirty girl, thumb stump.” She says.

   My first thoughts of “Cut” were that it was a bit strange and meaningless. But now that I have a better understanding of the poem, I think that it is fun and interesting. It was enjoyable to read because of all of the creative imagery used.

  

                                                                                         By Josh Lopdell.