Sylvia Plath Poem Cut

Out of all the poems available for a title poem for Sylvia Plath’s anthology, Cut would make the “cut”. While Sylvia has a much darker writing style, Cut is about as humorous as her poems get. Cut is one of the more memorable poems read by the class, and the poem sticks due to its odd descriptions and nooks and crannies of a chipped thumb. The only time Sylvia really utilizes humor in her poetry is when she makes fun of her own fumbles and follies, in Stings, about not conforming to the modern housewife image and falling for a man who later on had an affair with her, Tulips, about “hooks” holding back from ascending into the next life and the foolishness significance they have to her. In cut, the folly is a slip of the finger, followed by a flick of the wrist, resulting in the speaker nicking their finger on something, the way the scene plays out, one would think a murder has taken place, “Out of a gap A million soldiers run,Redcoats, every one.”, Redcoats is referring to the red blood cells, due to beings hues of kin, and represents the folly and danger of red imagery throughout the rest of the poems.
This poem contains red and white imagery, common in many of her poems. Similar to Tulips, the red imagery represents some sort of pain, i.e. the blood from her thumb, or in Tulip’s case a painful leech/parasite, a worthy adversary swaddled. Cut may seem a little dull, but her sharp wits are what makes this an optimal choice for the title poem. By borderline over-reading some of the lines, the poem is apt to describe one of Sylvia Plath’s suicide attempts, “I have taken a pill to kill”, the poem also used a metaphor referring to a pill, which was the root of Sylvia's first/second suicide attempt, the poem manifests different images from her other poems and coats the diction and syntax in a little bit of humor to make it easier to go