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.