I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind

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.