SOURCE: "Sylvia Plath's 'Cut,'" in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 6, 1975, pp. 128-34.

In the following essay, Spendal discusses the significance of color symbolism, historical reference, and Plath's use of physical ailment as a metaphor for psychological injury in the poem "Cut."

In several of her poems Sylvia Plath turns familiar bodily ills into metaphors of psychic affliction. Work like "The Eye-mote," "Fever 103°," "Paralytic," and "Amnesiac" are only incidentally concerned with the pathological states suggested by their titles. The ostensible problem in each case is a figure for a more subtle and profound malady, a disturbance of the will to live. This is also the strategy in "Cut," one of the most memorable and carefully crafted of the Ariel poems. On the literal level Plath's subject is a cut thumb; figuratively, it is the deeper disunity of a mind divided in its attitude toward death.

The vehicle for this...