I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind

Because Dickinson published only seven of her more than 1700 poems during her lifetime, providing any one of her poems with an appropriate (and accurate) historical context is challenging. Dickinson herself in filing her unpublished poems tended to bunch them by category—poems about nature, poems about love, poems about death—rather than in any chronological ordering. As her poems began to find their way to publication long after her death in 1886, it became something of a parlor game to try to find some keys in the poems themselves to when they might have been written.

That endeavor underscores the nature of the historical context of Dickinson’s poems in that they almost entirely lack that reassuring anchorage in the times and era of their composition. The most likely year of composition for Poem 937 is 1862—ish. The year is remarkable in that the poem does not appear to reflect the reality of her nation in the process of coming apart at the seams, a metaphor potentially applicable to the poem itself. It is not as if Dickinson was unaware of her historical moment. Although long framed as some kind of haunted recluse, Dickinson was in fact much engaged with her world, through correspondence and through her role as the kind of de facto administrator of her father’s household.