The poem "Cut" by Sylvia Plath is a confessional poem written during an especially difficult time in her life. It had recently become publicized that her husband, Ted Hughes, was having an affair, and Plath's emotional response to this is a significant theme throughout this poem and others of her Ariel period.

Plath uses metaphors to draw a correlation between the poem's speaker, who has cut her finger, and a feeling of emotional extremity:

Whose side are they on?
O my
homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill
the thin
papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man——

The use of the phrases "my / homunculus," "Saboteur," and "Kamikaze man" can be seen as direct references to betrayal by a man. Further, in using the term "homunculus," which has applications in medicine and germ theory, Plath allows the emotional tenor of the poem to infiltrate her speaker's description of a physical injury—that is, a cut at the top of her thumb.

In examining these and similar metaphors that bring emotional and physical harm together, the poem's project of narrating emotional harm via harm to the physical body is established.