20 pages • 40-minute read
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
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Symbols & Motifs
A Cleaver
The poem begins in the aftermath of violence that is likened to an aggressive swing of a cleaver, a kind of a broad-edged hatchet most often used to cut through thick slabs of meat: “I felt a cleaving in my mind / As if my brain had split” (Lines 1-2). The poem explores how to describe how an emotional experience, whether sorrowful or joyful, painful or ecstatic, somehow registers in the senses. How does a feeling, ethereal and non-corporeal, manage nevertheless to impact the senses, to compel us to feel? The cleaver, although it never actually appears in the poem save as a thing remembered, represents the brute force of emotions that have stunned the poet. The cleaver is by itself an intimidating instrument, its impact absolute, its power undeflectable. The poet links a cleaver (something physical and very concrete) to the mind (an abstract entity, a quality not directly validated by the senses), to suggest the feeling of feelings. The poem uses the cleaver to suggest how bald and vivid, how disruptive, even painful, was the emotional blow. In doing so, the poet reveals how something so ethereal as an emotional experience can register nevertheless as a physical wounding. The cleaver allows the poem to gift the abstract with concrete qualities, creating the apparent paradox of a sensual concept.
The Seamstress
The seamstress symbolizes the futility of trying to negate the powerful impact of the emotions. If there is an ironic presence in the poem, something clearly out of sync with the argument the poet is making, it is surely the seamstress introduced in the closing two lines of the first stanza. The mind has just been devastated. The intellect reels in the sudden exposure of its uselessness or at minimum the irony of its omnipotence. The brain is split, disconnected, left to its own devices. The poet suggests the devastation is like a cloth ripped in two, a suggestion of the intellect and heart or perhaps the intellect and the soul. The mind has been effectively usurped, insight blurred, understanding rendered a diversion, a coaxing fantasy.
Initially uneasy over the immobilizing of the mind, however, the poet recasts herself as a seamstress furiously struggling to repair the dynamic between head and heart that had created the peace and quiet before the metaphoric hatchet swing, before the tectonic emotional experience revealed the irony of such quiet, calm clarity. The poet admits that she “could not make [the pieces] fit” (Line 4). Hence the seamstress, for all her domestic skills, cannot entirely restore the mind to its former sense of empowerment. A seamstress is not a poet. Patching up the devastated heart is a fool’s errand, one the poet comes to find ironic. The poet sees the problem. The experience cannot be fixed, cannot be un-experienced. The seamstress represents the wasted energy of those who are not poets, who do not glimpse the potential for redemption possible once the mind embraces its limited muscle.
Balls of Unraveled Yarn
In the closing stanza, the poet shifts metaphors from sewing to knitting. The balls of yarn, carelessly unraveled, that close the poem symbolize the poet’s upended thoughts in the wake of some strong emotional experience. The poet suddenly cannot think clearly. There is, however, nothing in the argument of the poem that might suggest the poet would not follow that idea with a resounding Hallelujah.
With any other poet, the deposing of the intellect, the idea that ideas themselves have been shredded like balls of unraveled yarn, might imply a tragedy, a mental collapse, a situation that would call for panic, even anxiety. Not so much with Dickinson. The knitting metaphor here suggests the intellect is rendered useless, unable to think clearly, to find the resources that cool into clarity. Sequence, or the ability of the mind to follow through an experience, to explain it all and be utterly certain of its every twist, its every turn, is lost. Thoughts themselves, that is the perceptions of the intellect in hyperdrive, have unraveled in the wake of this experience. The vast resources of the mind have been rendered ironic. There, the poet points to the balls of shredded yarn, and there rests logic and reasoning. Although the shredded yarn has been taken variously as a stark, even terrifying symbol of mental health disorder, the closing two lines are remarkably unremarkable in emotion and tone, more matter of fact than panicky, more descriptive than argumentative, the heavy oppressive presence of the intellect rendered as harmless as discarded yarn.
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