“Cut” Sylvia Plath
Persona
In terms of content the persona in “Cut” is Sylvia Plath herself. Plath was one of the first American women writers to refuse to conceal her true emotions. In articulating her aggression, hostility and despair in her art, she effectively challenged the traditional literary prioritization of female experience. Plath has experienced much melancholy and depression in her life.
Scenario
The scenario of the poem starts off in a seemingly domestic scene, perhaps preparing for dinner and develops into this amazing association and blurring of the physical and emotional senses, where a great joy has been found in an ‘accident’. Plath dedicates “Cut” to her new au pair (nanny), Susan O’Neill Roe as a “welcome to the family” gesture. It is most likely the au pairs thumb, which has been cut however Plath refers to it as her own thumb as a sign of empathy/psychosis. In the poem, Plath describes the feelings and sensations of deliberate self mutilation and the emotional release it brings. The cutting of the thumb can be viewed in a Freudian manner in which the incident occurred accidentally “on purpose” a parapraxis, having the effect of building up tension.
Context
The context in which the poem is taking place is in England, isolated away from all her family and friends, during the 1950's where Plath was the victim of a male-orientated sexist society and her poetry a choreography of female wounds. Values portrayed through “Cut” are Plath’s life of hardships from separation, divorce and as a single mother and poet. Through the remarkable consistent images that all “flow” from her very ordinary “accident” it is evident that this poem showcases a history of bloodshed through war, death, injury and maiming in the Western world and Plath’s family history
Story
The story of “Cut” is a rapid succession/conglomeration off sensations and images of violence and bloodshed throught history and its emotional relief. Plath chooses to use an ongoing metaphor of a battle between two armies. She is possibly one soldier who has lost much, while fighting the depression battle. This poem demonstrates Plath’s disconnection from humanity as for example she disassociates the thumb as being part of the body. The fact that she relates her cut to onions, with cooking as a household duty displaying her discontentment with her role as a housewife and mot...
... middle of paper ...
...rill-“ creates a colloquial level of language, where in this case an exclamation mark could have been used.
Sounds
A variety of language devices are employed to create tone for the poem. Sounds such as assonance is used in the line “a flap like a hat” with an emphasis on ‘t’ and taken off on ‘a’ coupled with dental ‘t’ and plosive ‘p’ evoking and mirroring the on/off nature of a hat, in reference to the skin that has been cut on her thumb. Internal assonance and consonance appear and disappear with unpredictability. This demonstrates signs of Plath’s mental illness. Also there is assonance in “little pilgrim, the Indian’s axed your scalp” where the chopping sounds evoke the movement.
In conclusion, there is more than one implication of the word alone “cut” [hurt,injured,rejected,excluded]these are to mean: physically injured, rejected or wounded by people, excluded by living on own and bleeding in all senses and self mutilation. In the poem “Cut” by Sylvia Plath there is more to the poem than moods and feelings through the use of context and technique. For instance images,sounds,tones,rhythm,rhyme and form which all add up to an effective poem with textual integrity.
The poem is split it in to two stanzas: the first stanza is in the past tense as she remembers the birth of her daughter and the second stanza is Catrin’s childhood and suggest that they are still struggling between them. The breaking stanza displays the cutting of the umbilical cord.
Tear off a leg'', to his heart and angina - or perhaps damaged or lack of an emotional heart - a representative or metaphor of the callousness of life and sometimes savage sports fan/male psyche/cruelty to people, ending with his disappointment and silent stillness when The Masked Man rallied from near defeat? I don't even feel as though it's melodramatic to wonder, because every thing, every detail, and every word in this essay seems to have a purpose and a plan for extending and detailing the story and the people within it. Richard, in a way, lost his childhood and his innocence that night, from his early accounts of the evening and how he was just ten years old and it was his first ever night out, to his realization and fear as the night begins to take a turn he realizes he is unhappy and uncomfortable with. Perhaps that night stirred his beginning interest to becoming a surgeon and helping
“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” is the last line in the poem. It is not until the end that we realize that not only is she through with the memories of her dead father and the adulterous behavior of her husband, but she is through with herself. This last line is clear – Plath has just announced to her readers that she will be committing suicide again, and plans on being successful at it. So, instead of this poem being Plath’s victorious confession to the horrible men in her life, and finally allowing closure, the poem is an outline of her promising death. Plath is still pained by these men, and cannot completely go on being alive. She believes that death is her only solution, and maybe in a way it was. Perhaps she is finally free, and finally able to “breath” and “Achoo.”
Sylvia Plath a highly acclaimed twentieth century American poet whose writings were mostly influenced by her life experiences. Her father died shortly after her eighth birthday and her first documented attempt at suicide was in her early twenties. She was married at age twenty-three and when she discovered her husband was having an affair she left him with their two children. Her depression and the abandonment she felt as a child and as a woman is what inspires most of her works. Daddy is a major decision point where Plath decides to overcome her father’s death by telling him she will no longer allow his memory to control her.
Sylvia Plath, a great American author, focuses mostly on actual experiences. Plath’s poetry displays feelings and emotions. Plath had the ability to transform everyday happenings into poems or diary entries. Plath had a passion for poetry and her work was valued. She was inspired by novelists and her own skills. Her poetry was also very important to readers and critics. Sylvia Plath’s work shows change throughout her lifetime, relates to feelings and emotions, and focuses on day to day experiences.
While at Smith, Plath received many awards in regard to the poetry that she had written. After winning the Mademoiselle fiction contest, the popular magazine offered Plath a place on their editorial board. While working with Mademoiselle, Pla...
Sylvia Plath may be one of the most remarkable and idolized modern poets of the twentieth century. Sylvia Plath had an emotional life, and a troublesome past with her father's death, insecurities because of self-doubt, a tragic break up with her husband and severe depression, leading to her suicide in 1963. These tragic events in Plath’s life played a vast part in her career as a poet and novelist, by inspiring her to create her melancholy and notorious masterpieces.
As the tone changes the perspective of the reader changes as well. There is no clear way to determine whether the speaker is responding to her situation with the appropriate amount of madness or is actually going mad and escaping into her own mind. Plath’s poem shows how a woman 's happiness was defined by her relationship to a man, which is enough to infuriate or drive any woman insane. The speaker struggles to continue her very existence because of her lost love. It is true that the speaker is very emotional and feels things very deeply, but that is not enough to prove that she had lost her mind. By the end of the poem the speaker seems to realize that she is wasting her time waiting on a man. She would rather have a present love that is completely unfathomable than a real love that is not around. The repetition in this poem makes the reader believe this loss is actually causing the speaker to lose her mind, but through changing tones that mirror the emotions anyone would go through in a situation of loss like this the speaker’s response is completely
Throughout the poem, Plath contradicts herself, saying, ‘I was seven, I knew nothing’ yet she constantly talks of the past, remembering. Her tone is very dark and imposing, she uses many images of blindness, deafness and a severe lack of communication, ‘So the deaf and dumb/signal the blind, and are ignored’. Her use of enjambment shows her feelings and pain in some places, in other places it covers up her emotional state. She talks of her father being a German, a Nazi. Whilst her father may have originated from Germany, he was in no way a Nazi, or a fascist. He was a simple man who made sausages. ‘Lopping the sausages!’ However she used this against her father, who died when she was but eight, saying that she still had night mares, ‘They color1 my sleep,’ she also brings her father’s supposed Nazism up again, ‘Red, mottled, like cut necks./There was a silence!’. Plath also talks of her father being somewhat of a general in the militia, ‘A yew hedge of orders,’ also with this image she brings back her supposed vulnerability as a child, talking as if her father was going to send her away, ‘I am guilty of nothing.’ For all her claims of being vul...
women. This poem shows just that. After the fish monger asks her if she wants the fish cut, she immediately says no. She is “Not a girl and longer, she is capable of her own knife work now. She understands sharpness and duty.” This quote, in itself, not only shows that she believes she is capable of doing things herself, but that she can be a force in the world. She understands what she is supposed to do, but realizes that because of her sharpness, she can do more that her duty. The use of the word sharpness here is key. She is not just clear on what she wants, but she will do anything she has to to get it. She goes on to say, “She knows what a blade can reveal and destroy… She would rather be the one deciding what she keeps and what she throws away.” This again points out the feminist side of the women. She understands how she is supposed to act, but she gets to decide what she is going to keep of that idea and what she is going to discard. She gets to decide how she can use the little power she has to reveal and destroy. Reveal here implies a much deeper meaning than to uncover, but that with her determination she can expose social injustice in the world and has the power to demolish it entirely. She is not just a girl, she is a person with a voice to be heard. This idea is also mirrored with
Plath employs a shift to accentuate a change in time. The speaker of the poem says “I am silver and exact/Now I am a lake” (1, 10) to indicate an alteration in time. The purpose of the device is to convey an adjustment in c...
In lines 65-66 Plath uses apostrophe to address those doctors: "So, so, Herr Doktor / So, so Herr Enemy." To her, the doctors are enemies- in the stanza previous to this line, she establishes the doctors as nearly vulture-like. Lines 61-64 state, "And there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood / Or a piece of hair on my clothes."Assonance ("charge, large charge") is used in this example in a mocking fashion towards the doctors. Lines 67-68 establish the speaker's fear that her fate is being used by the doctors for gain in the field of science: "I am your opus / I am your valuable." Later, the speaker-character's contempt of the doctors that Plath has established is tied in to a Nazi allusion, which augments this concept. In lines 73-78, Plath writes, "Ash, ash--- / You poke and stir / Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--- / A cake of soap / A wedding ring / A gold filling." This allusion to Nazis (wedding rings and gold fillings were harvested from the imprisoned Jews during the Holocaust, and their remains were used for soap) is also an example of an extended metaphor. The Nazi metaphor is, in fact, extended over other Plath poems as well- notably "Daddy.
I believe Plath might take on an alternate identity in order to write this poem. The speaker in this poem seems to be depressed. Depressed about her life, her family, and her situation in this hospital. Visible from “ the green plastic–pillowed trolley” that she lays on are, red tulips. Plath writes in seven line stanzas.
To begin, the episodic shifts in scenes in this ballad enhance the speaker’s emotional confusion. Almost every stanza has its own time and place in the speaker’s memory, which sparks different emotions with each. For example, the first stanza is her memory of herself at her house and it has a mocking, carefree mood. She says, “I cut my lungs with laughter,” meaning that...
The poetry of Sylvia Plath can be interpreted psychoanalytically. Sigmund Freud believed that the majority of all art was a controlled expression of the unconscious. However, this does not mean that the creation of art is effortless; on the contrary it requires a high degree of sophistication. Works of art like dreams have both a manifest content (what is on the surface) and latent content (the true meaning). Both dreams and art use symbolism and metaphor and thus need to be interpreted to understand the latent content. It is important to maintain that analyzing Plaths poetry is not the same as analyzing Plath; her works stand by themselves and create their own fictional world. In the poems Lady Lazarus, Daddy and Electra on Azalea Path the psychoanalytic motifs of sadomasochism, regression and oral fixation, reperesnet the desire to return to the incestuous love object.