Post by louisa on Nov 8, 2008 1:16:46 GMT 2
Cut
by Sylvia Plath
submitted by Barbara Crooker
I’m not quite sure when I bought Ariel, but the cover has yellowed and the pages are fluttering from the spine. I do know I can’t count the number of times I’ve read it through, astonished each time at its power, its urgency, its white-hot heat. Since we can only pick one poem, I’ve chosen “Cut,” because I’m still stunned at what Plath can do with language, sound, and rhythm.
Imagine that, on slicing your thumb, you’d step back thrilled to find you’d cut your finger instead of an onion, and that you’d see the slash as a cap, then a scalped pilgrim, then a little man. And that you’d see the blood that rolls out as a turkey wattle, then a platoon of soldiers, “Redcoats, every one.”
Each four-line stanza clots, a clump of sounds: “thumb/onion/gone/hinge,” “flap/hat,”
“little/pilgrim,” “soldiers run/every one,” “I am ill/pill to kill,” “balled pulp/small mill,” and the thump of “jump/thumb/stump” at the end. The rhythm of the short enjambed lines mimics the chop of cutting vegetables.
And the extended metaphor at the end takes it to another level, the bloody march of history, from native Americans and pilgrims, to British soldiers, to the Japanese and Russians in our time, not to mention what’s invoked by likening the gauze bandage to Ku Klux Klan garb. “How you jump,” Plath writes, and how she jumps, from image to brilliant image, sharp as the blade that started this poem. How fresh this poem is, and how new.
To read Cut:
plagiarist.com/poetry/1388/
More about the poet and more poems:
www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/11
www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=5420
by Sylvia Plath
submitted by Barbara Crooker
I’m not quite sure when I bought Ariel, but the cover has yellowed and the pages are fluttering from the spine. I do know I can’t count the number of times I’ve read it through, astonished each time at its power, its urgency, its white-hot heat. Since we can only pick one poem, I’ve chosen “Cut,” because I’m still stunned at what Plath can do with language, sound, and rhythm.
Imagine that, on slicing your thumb, you’d step back thrilled to find you’d cut your finger instead of an onion, and that you’d see the slash as a cap, then a scalped pilgrim, then a little man. And that you’d see the blood that rolls out as a turkey wattle, then a platoon of soldiers, “Redcoats, every one.”
Each four-line stanza clots, a clump of sounds: “thumb/onion/gone/hinge,” “flap/hat,”
“little/pilgrim,” “soldiers run/every one,” “I am ill/pill to kill,” “balled pulp/small mill,” and the thump of “jump/thumb/stump” at the end. The rhythm of the short enjambed lines mimics the chop of cutting vegetables.
And the extended metaphor at the end takes it to another level, the bloody march of history, from native Americans and pilgrims, to British soldiers, to the Japanese and Russians in our time, not to mention what’s invoked by likening the gauze bandage to Ku Klux Klan garb. “How you jump,” Plath writes, and how she jumps, from image to brilliant image, sharp as the blade that started this poem. How fresh this poem is, and how new.
To read Cut:
plagiarist.com/poetry/1388/
More about the poet and more poems:
www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/11
www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=5420