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unloved, unhappy, unsatisfied, unknown, unattractive (she famously compared her face to a kangaroo’s), unread and unpublished, unappreciated.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.