I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind

Even for contemporary readers not familiar with the magnitude and reach of her oeuvre, Emily Dickinson is a known commodity. She is simply the Un-poet: unmarried, unloved, unhappy, unsatisfied, unknown, unattractive (she famously compared her face to a kangaroo’s), unread and unpublished, unappreciated. It is tempting to let the poem rest on the simplification of a quasi-literal reading that reflects the Un-poet. In this reading, Dickinson, herself long seen as a troubled individual, the prototype of the emo-goth hermit who wrestled with depression and melancholia, lays out how it feels to be slowly, steadily faced with mental health conditions, perhaps clinical depression, among others. In this reading of the poem, the cleaving of the brain represents a kind of metaphor for the difficult reality of the onset of psychiatric disorders, perhaps even schizophrenia or the first irreversible signs of a fast-approaching dementia, how in the second stanza the poet simply bids farewell to even the hope that her mental acuity might ever return, that her mental health has forever rendered hope itself ironic. She is forever left with pieces. Within this reading, the poem becomes a claustrophobic echo chamber, encroaching confusion contemplating the agonies and ironies of, well, encroaching mental health experiences.

For Dickinson, emotions are never simple. Love, fear, desire, joy, sorrow, expectation, disappointment—they are always felt in the extreme. Emotions are intense and complex experiences that, if survived (and the very real dilemma Dickinson’s poems work hinges on the distinct possibility that emotions can actually, literally overwhelm) forever scar, forever wound. Paradoxically, the only thing worse than being so grievously wounded is to never be so grievously wounded at all. That is the central tension (and the source of the poem’s unexpected redemptive optimism): the tension between the intellect struggling to understand what the poet herself suspects can never be understood.

Here, some titanic emotional moment has rent the very being of the aware and vulnerable poet and left the poet uncertain, really uneasy over the possibility that the psychological impact may be permanent, that the wounding may never heal, suggested by the seamstress struggling valiantly to try to piece together torn pieces of fabric, all too aware the seam will always show. The intellect, so upended by the renegade heart, will never entirely right itself. The metaphor in the second stanza about the unravelling balls of yarn suggests nothing so much as the unravelling of the poet’s mind itself, the failure of the brain to function in the face of such a cleaving. Regarded as a simple expression of the onset of clinical depression, the poem edges into a darkness, a forbidding concession to the brain’s uncertain collapse into anguish, with the disturbing hint that behind such collapse may lurk the threat of a vast and insidious breakdown.

The unraveling, however, isn’t the only interpretation. Imagine, for a moment, that we did not have to import Dickinson’s biography into an analysis of the poem, that it might stand as it was designed to stand: as a testimonial to a single pivotal moment. If it is read as a Dickinson poem, then her brand demands it be depressing, gloomy, desolate, her poems pre-set like Halloween haunted houses. Imagine for a moment the poem is read for what it is, a text, a tight and clean celebration of the limits of the intellect, a mind struggling to explain how little it can explain, how little logic can encompass what the heart feels.

Unlike the poems of her era, the stately sculpted stuff of public poets handing down wisdom in august and measured voice, reading the poems of Emily Dickinson is more akin to reading the pages of a diary, the experience of intimacy suggesting the position of the poet as less an August Public Figure and more a kind of wounded individual, inclined to enchantment but aware of its fragile nature. Imagine, then, the poet is in the after-throes of experience, say, a dazzling sunrise or first love or the enchanting moment of first reading a new poem, experiences that she knows, given her tender and impressionable heart, she can never, will never entirely forget. Now the metaphors of the poem read differently—the cleaving of the brain, the inability to ever entirely undo the impact, and the realization that the intellect’s very train of perception, the status quo dynamics of careful reasoning, simply no longer work. The tonic reaction she feels is inexplicable in grossly logical terms, thus short-circuiting her intellect and sending her reeling. She knows, gratefully, that she can never be entirely restored to what she was before because she has experienced something so sumptuous, so unexpectedly dazzling, so entirely at right angles to what life has gifted her with to that point, that she gratefully acknowledges that her perception and her very intellect are forever altered.

For a poet thus empowered, the paltry stuff of logic, the careful linking of cause to effect, the tidy sense of living within the expectation of, well, nothing, a world that cannot excite, cannot surprise, cannot step outside the rigid logic of sequence, is casually discarded like the balls of yarn unraveled on the floor. The poet may not entirely understand the magnitude or the dimension of what has just happened but understands the exhilaration of her liberation into the new. After all, it is difficult to square the idea of the poem as a dark record of the poet’s sliding into melancholia and depression or dementia, when the poem itself so giddily plays with language, so happily upends conventional notions of a poetic line, and so gleefully discards rules of grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. That daemon spirit suggests that the intellect reeling from the evidence of its own limits finally sings free of such boundaries to delight in its embrace of its own emancipation.