“Cut” Sylvia PlathPersonaIn terms of content, the person in “Cut” is Sylvia Plath herself. Plath was one of the first American writers to refuse to hide her true emotions. In articulating her aggression, hostility, and desperation in her art, she effectively challenged the traditional literary priority of female experience. Plath experienced a lot of melancholy and depression in her life. Setting The setting of the poem begins in a seemingly domestic scene, perhaps while preparing dinner and develops into this astonishing association and blurring of the physical and emotional senses, where 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. Most likely it is the au pair's thumb, which has been cut off, however Plath calls it 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 where the accident occurred accidentally "on purpose", a parapraxis, with the effect of increasing tension. Context The context in which the poem is set is England, isolated from everything. her family and friends, in the 1950s, when Plath was the victim of a sexist, chauvinist society and her poetry a choreography of female wounds. The values ​​represented through “Cut” represent Plath's life of hardship resulting from separation, divorce, and as a single mother and poet. Through the extraordinary coherent images that all "flow" from her ordinary "accident", it is evident that this poem showcases a history of bloodshed through wars, death, wounds and mutilations in the Western world and the history of Plath's family. Story The story of "Cut" is a rapid succession/agglomeration of sensations and images of violence and bloodshed throughout the story and its emotional relief. Plath chooses to use an ongoing metaphor of a battle between two armies. Perhaps he is a soldier who has lost much while fighting the battle against depression. This poem demonstrates Plath's disconnection from humanity as, for example, she dissociates the thumb as a part of the body. The fact that she connects her cutting of onions, with cooking as a domestic duty, showing her discontent with her role as a housewife and mot...... middle of paper ......rill-“ creates a colloquial level of language, where in this case an exclamation point could have been used. Sounds A variety of linguistic devices are used to create the tone of the poem. Sounds such as assonance are used in the line “a flap like a hat” with an emphasis on the 't' and removed on the 'a' coupled with the dental 't' and plosive 'p' which evoke and reflect nature on /off of a hat, referring to the skin that was cut on his thumb. Internal assonances and consonances appear and disappear with unpredictability. This demonstrates the signs of Plath's mental illness. There is also an assonance in “little pilgrim, the Indian has axed your scalp” where the cutting sounds evoke movement. In conclusion, there is more than one implication of just the word “cut” [hurt, wounded, rejected, excluded], these are to mean: physically hurt, rejected or hurt by people, excluded living alone and bleeding in every sense and self-mutilation. In the poem “Cut” by Sylvia Plath there is much more than moods and feelings through the use of context and technique. For example images, sounds, tones, rhythm, rhyme and form that add up to an effective poem with textual integrity..