20 pages • 40 minutes read
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
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Literary Devices
Form
The form of Poem 937 is itself a bravado act of defiance, really against itself. In a poem that tests and even flaunts the limits of the intellect to contain and control the riotous passions of the vulnerable and open heart, that celebration of emotional extremes is cased in the tidiest of poetic forms: the quatrain. The rhyming pattern—ABCB DEFE—is as conventional as it is tight and reassuringly regular and even predictable. The poem expresses the uncertain aftermath of the intellect’s decimation in two tight, clean quatrains that reassure despite the upheaval, despite the anxious feeling of the mind being cleaved into uselessness, that the intellect survives to record its own chaos. The poem, then, questions the power of the mind that has, since the Renaissance, been the metric for culture and advancement in Western civilization, in a form that has since the Renaissance been the highest expression of the mind to discipline and contain anarchy. How better to explore the tensions between head and heart than by casing that emotional contest in a form that can reassure the continuing viability of the very intellect that appears in the poem itself in fragments.
What gives an otherwise unsettling poem its vigor and its kinetics then is not so much the quatrains and the rhyming but the ways in which the poet upends conventional expectations of poetic form, specifically the radical use of apparently random capitalizations and the eccentric sense of punctuation (particularly the double hyphens) that compel unexpected pauses in the recitation, a defiant celebration of the very anarchy the poem appears to find disturbing.
Meter
Poem 937 is written in what is termed common meter, so called because of its centuries of use in a wide range of Christian poetics. Meter refers to how the poet creates the rhythm in a line of poetry using stressed and unstressed syllables much as a composer creates a line of music through the use of notes with differing time-values. Largely because of the immense emotional and psychological debt Dickinson felt from her upbringing studying the King James Bible of her family’s rooted Protestantism, Dickinson most often used common meter, the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables typical of both church hymns and Old Testament psalms. The meter fit Dickinson’s poetic voice. As in those expressions, here the lines alternate between iambic tetrameter—that is, four feet, or beats, per line, a beat being a unit of stressed and unstressed syllables—and trimeter—that is, a line with three such units. The alternating patterns create a sustainable sense of variety and avoids monotonous delivery.
For instance, take the opening lines:
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind --
As if my Brain had split –
Despite Dickinson’s often radical thematic arguments and despite her audacious and eccentric sense of deploying a cascade of stunning and unexpected metaphors (here, for instance, a cleaver cutting the brain in two, then a frustrated seamstress, and finally balls of knitting yarn), the common meter offers a sense of stability and regularity and even tradition. The meter would be familiar to her New England readers had she ever wanted to pursue publication. With impish delight, Dickinson used common meter to subvert common wisdom and common expectations.
Voice
If Whitman is forever Whitman, Frost, Frost, and Poe, Poe, Dickinson is, well, Emily. In Poem 973, there is an immediacy, a daring disregard for the traditional reader/poet dynamic. Who is Dickinson addressing with such urgency? There is no narrative context, no conversation, no action really, just the meditation itself. There is an intimacy to an Emily Dickinson poem. Unlike most poets, certainly the poets of her era, there is here a feeling that the reader is eavesdropping on the poet in conversation with herself or is reading through the poet’s private diary. The voice in the Dickinson poem beggars traditional dynamics largely because the poems were never designed for publication and hence lack that feeling of separation. The voice heard is a wounded, vulnerable individual named Emily, no persona, no stagey presence, no public pretense, really talking to herself. The first-person voice here in Poem 937 addresses only the poet herself as she struggles to come to terms with the tectonic impact of an experience that she cannot even bring herself to share while all about her the rest of the world goes about its busy-ness.
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By Emily Dickinson
