20 pages • 40-minute read
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
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Themes
The Tectonic Impact of Emotion
Given the post-Romantic era in which Dickinson created her poetry, an era in which poets, following the cue of the towering figures in British Romanticism such as William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, had grown comfortable with the idea that the full register of a poet’s emotions is fit subject for poetic investigation, Dickinson’s investigation into emotions suggests that those poet’s singing of the heart and its graceful energy—whether stunned into reaction by a gathering of wild flowers or by the comely face of a lover—was significantly out of line with the actual rending experience of the heart.
Here the impact of strong emotions registers like a hatchet cleaving the brain, severing in effect the ability to sort through, contain, and direct the heart. The violence with which the emotions strike the poet here suggests that impact, whether through the experience of sorrow or joy, is impossible to ever entirely forget. The poet says how she tried to restore the integrity of the head and heart, the intellect and the emotions, but “could not make them fit” (Line 4). Here the poet reflects helplessness—after all, the ax is swung by another. The poet is a victim of her own heart to the point where logic, thought, and rationality itself seems suddenly (and the poet senses perhaps permanently) out of sync. Such tectonic impact surely makes the ordinary experiences of the heart within the busyness of a reader’s life seem lackluster and paltry by comparison. Who has felt grief this deep? Who has felt joy this absolute? For Dickinson, emotions were always scored to grand operatic dimensions, their impact as deep as they are lingering. Thus, whether the poem is read as an anatomy into the impact of despair or of joy, the poem suggests that authentic emotions strike but never entirely heal.
The Limits of the Intellect
As something of an autodidact in the literature of contemporary science, Dickinson was fascinated by pioneering studies into the function of the brain itself, particularly emerging theories that the brain was bicameral, that it functioned through the dynamic of two so-called hemispheres, one directing reason and decision making, the other expressing anxieties and emotions. By engaging everyday dilemmas, those two hemispheres worked toward some helpful and workable compromise. Too much of one leaves the person emotionally sterile; too much of the other leaves open the possibility of anarchy.
Dickinson, for her perspective, was impressed most by the mind’s capacity to imagine, to provoke entire worlds from the thin air of thought, and to conjure the stuff of ideas. The brain seemed limitless as the sky, akin to what Christians attribute to the power of God. Here, however, Dickinson acknowledges that the brain has limits, the intellect falters at those critical moments when the emotions severe the fragile link between experience and explanation, between what has happened and what it means. The poet struggles to try to piece back together the world before the cleaver swung, that is before the experience of potent emotion. By comparing the action to the futility of a seamstress struggling to piece together the rent parts of cloth, the poet suggests that ultimately the mind must accept its limits, that experience inevitably shatters the mind’s pretense to understanding. The closing image, logic and thought and the delightful reassurance of sequence and causality, is compared to unraveled balls of yarn scattered randomly on the floor, suggesting that in the end the brain can only do so much to impose order, logic, and explanation. Life demands adjustment to that limit and abandons the calming sense that the intellect can somehow explain everything. For Dickinson, that the intellect explains nothing means everything.
The Dynamics of Adjustment
Poem 937 is an aftermath poem. That the poem has been read with such a variety of perspectives—it is an account of a schizophrenic delusion, an epileptic episode (epilepsy ran in Dickinson’s family), the onset of dementia (although Dickinson was herself barely 30 when she composed it), the strike-force of a migraine headache, the first glimmer of a mental health issue, the cloaking descent of manic depression—indicates that the poem is a reactive argument. Suggested by the past tense verb in the opening line (“felt”), the poem explores not so much the experience as the struggle to adjust to that experience. Whether anatomizing the impact of a kiss or a friend’s death, seeing a stunning work of art or a gorgeous sunset, poets strive to put into words the emotional experience itself. Not so here. The poem is like accounting for an explosion by kicking through the rubble or calibrating the gun by measuring the gaping wound it left or piecing through the wreckage of a plane to discover the cause of the crash.
To understand the experience entirely, the poem argues, would be to minimize the emotions themselves. Contentment here comes from adjustment not from insight, accommodation not recovery. The poet then emerges as heroic by virtue of accepting that vulnerability and by coming to terms with the reality that given the explosive (perhaps implosive would be a better term) impact of the experience the intellect will scramble futilely for a vocabulary that will domesticate that experience. Like the seamstress always aware of the seams left exposed, the sheer impossibility of ever repairing the rent cloth entirely, the poet here comes to terms with the reality of adjustment. Unlike other poems that celebrate the experience itself and offer dazzling accounts of that kinetics, here the poem takes place in the quiet wake-moments just after. Disjointed, overwhelmed, disoriented, uncertain, and essentially, even existentially helpless, the poet finds in the bold articulation of such a condition the stuff of valiant survival. I am still standing, she professes, here amid the fragments.
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