I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind

Reflecting her lifelong fascination with exploring wrenching moments of extreme emotional intensity, Emily Dickinson’s Poem 937 (“I Felt a Cleaving in My Mind”) captures the feeling of helplessness as the mind struggles toward awareness after just such a moment. Published in 1890 as part of the first posthumous collection of her poetry (Dickinson seldom pursued publication of her eccentric and idiosyncratic verse during her lifetime), Poem 937 records the disorienting moment immediately after some unexpected and unanticipated emotional intensity has decimated the brain’s ability to understand the implication of such an impact. As with many of Dickinson’s verses, the poem exposes the vanity of explanation, the insufficiencies of insight, and the sheer irony of the intellect’s pretense to control the antic play of the heart. Because Dickinson’s biography looms so large above her work and because she has come to be typecast as America’s Grand Recluse, perpetually depressed, terminally melancholic, always bordering on mental health collapse, Poem 937 has often been read as a chronicle of a mental health breakdown or the intellect’s struggle to accept death or the pain of loneliness. However, the text itself opens up to a much wider, and more luminous, interpretive horizon: The poem is as much about experiencing the joy of a stunning sunrise as understanding the inevitability of mortality, as much about the sumptuous moment of falling in love as struggling to survive the agony of separation.

Poet Biography

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born 10 December 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, then as now a quiet college town, her father a successful lawyer and a trustee at Amherst College. Dickinson, early on while attending Amherst Academy, a kind of prep school, proved a voracious and unconventional reader, fascinated as much by Christian theological writings as by the cutting-edge theoretical work in the new sciences, as much by the metaphysical poets of the English Renaissance as by the provocative essays of the new school of American Transcendentalists. In 1847, Dickinson briefly attended nearby Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College, before returning home to Amherst. Unmarried, Dickinson, by nature shy, adopted a quiet lifestyle, seldom venturing from her family’s home, although maintaining vigorous correspondence with close friends and with her younger brother and sister while all the while helping to maintain her father’s hectic social schedule.

By 1850, Dickinson began to compose original verse. Fascinated by the process through which the intellect shaped emotional experiences using the vehicle of metaphors, Dickinson worked diligently crafting poetic lines radically different from the poetry of her era. She distilled poetic lines to minimalist expression, altered the grammatical use of words, created an individual style of punctuation and capitalization, and upcycled the gentle rhythms of the Protestant hymns she grew up listening to. Her poetry often reflected her intensely private life. Indeed, she pioneered what would become more than a generation after her death a major school of American poetry, introspective Confessional poetry. Her poems, so individual in their thematic investigations into the dynamics of love and loss and into the provocative reality of death and the difficult struggle for purpose, and so radical in their formal structuring, seldom found an interested publisher. Rather for decades, Dickinson relied on sharing her poems with a few close friends whose opinions she valued and otherwise carefully organizing her poems, never titled, seldom dated, into bundles lovingly bound with ribbon and kept in boxes beneath her bed in her Amherst home. Her poems totaled more than 1700 by the time of her death. What few poems she sent out for publication suffered at the hands of intrusive editors too quick to try to make her eccentric poems more conventional, less startling.

Upon Dickinson’s death in May, 1886, at the age of just 55, her family discovered the archive of her poetry and began to publish her verse to ever-increasing critical plaudits. A complete volume of her poems, however, would not appear until nearly 75 years after her death. Her simple gravesite, a white headstone inscribed with “Emily Dickinson Called Back,” has become something of a pilgrim site for generations of visitors, attesting to her now privileged place in America’s literary pantheon.

Poem Text

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind —

As if my Brain had split —

I tried to match it — Seam by Seam —

But could not make them fit.

The thought behind, I strove to join

Unto the thought before —

But Sequence ravelled out of Sound

Like Balls — upon a Floor.

Dickinson, Emily. “I Felt a Cleaving in My Mind.” 1890. Emily Dickinson Archive website.

Summary

Given Emily Dickinson’s penchant for testing the provocative wonderland logic of paradox, Poem 937 starts quietly, calmly, with nothing less than a swinging cleaver imbedding itself in her brain. “I felt a cleaving in my mind / As if my brain had split” (Lines 1-2). It is a metaphor, clearly, in which the poet struggles to find words to express an emotional moment that appears beyond the reach of the intellect. The experience, then, feels like an ax splitting her brain, suggesting a failure of the intellect to understand the something that has just happened that can only be suggested through the vehicle of a metaphor.

The metaphor—a cleaver splitting the brain—is clearly beyond the ken of an average reader—who knows how such a violent act actually feels as such an act threatens the very survival of the victim? Here the poet has survived the wounding that seems to make ironic the idea of recovery. Who recovers entirely from an ax driven into the brain? The metaphor then suggests a poet in the extremis of her emotions. This is not just another sad day with the blues. This is no passing anxiety. Whatever has happened (and the poem never explicitly defines the experience) is irreversible and unforgettable. The poet never specifically outlines the nature of the experience save that it is an involuntary thing, a feeling that was never sought, never expected, and impossible to anticipate. Indeed, the poem takes place in the calm quiet of the after-moment, the mind reeling against the sudden and irrefutable revelation of its inadequacy to understand.

In that aftermath moment, struggling to account for the depth and reach of the emotional experience, the poet introduces her second metaphor: a seamstress trying valiantly (and futilely) to piece back together pieces of cloth rent apart. The effort is heroic because it is futile—“I tried to match it, seam by seam / But could not make them fit” (Lines 3-4). The poet comes to understand that what has happened, whatever the experience, is not something easy to walk away from, easy to forget. The impact is such that her very perception of her life and its unfolding will never quite be the same. The seam, to follow her metaphor, will always show, and the rent cloth will never be whole. Nothing here suggests that the irreversible nature of the experience that defies the logic of the intellect to define, much less understand, is necessarily negative. Any number of otherwise splendid experiences—falling in love, sampling a new cuisine, making a friend, enjoying a new piece of music or discovering a new poem, relishing a day in the outdoors—could register in a way that promises they will never be entirely forgotten.

The second stanza reflects on the long-term impact of the experience by introducing yet a third metaphor: knitting; specifically, how difficult rewinding a ball of yarn is. The poet confesses that in the wake of the tectonic experience, intellectual thought itself, the careful and precise linking patterns of cause and effect that provide comfort and reassurance, seem to collapse of their own irony. The poet seeks to execute the simplest act of intellectual thought, “join” one thought “unto the thought before” (Lines 5-6). The intellect, here, can only go so far before it must acknowledge its limits. Reeling in the aftermath of this experience, the poet finds that suddenly nothing makes such clear and tidy sense. Sequence itself has become unraveled like the balls of yarn coming unraveled in knitting, impossible to restore, impossible to re-ravel as it were. The second stanza recreates that vertiginous feeling of sudden disorientation, a feeling of being suddenly absolutely lost, vulnerable, and helpless. Whether struggling to adjust to seismic sorrow or joy, the poet is left suddenly exposed, the comforting security of logic and the reassurance of explanation lost. Ultimately, a cancer patient reeling from a terminal prognosis and a person falling at last in love are helpless in the same way.

There the poem ends, the poet seeing clearly that clear sight is not the same as insight, that the more she struggles to understand what just happened, the less she will ever understand what just happened.