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Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem begins in the aftermath of violence that is likened to an aggressive swing of a cleaver, a kind of a broad-edged hatchet most often used to cut through thick slabs of meat: “I felt a cleaving in my mind / As if my brain had split” (Lines 1-2). The poem explores how to describe how an emotional experience, whether sorrowful or joyful, painful or ecstatic, somehow registers in the senses. How does a feeling, ethereal and non-corporeal, manage nevertheless to impact the senses, to compel us to feel? The cleaver, although it never actually appears in the poem save as a thing remembered, represents the brute force of emotions that have stunned the poet. The cleaver is by itself an intimidating instrument, its impact absolute, its power undeflectable. The poet links a cleaver (something physical and very concrete) to the mind (an abstract entity, a quality not directly validated by the senses), to suggest the feeling of feelings. The poem uses the cleaver to suggest how bald and vivid, how disruptive, even painful, was the emotional blow. In doing so, the poet reveals how something so ethereal as an emotional experience can register nevertheless as a physical wounding.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
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"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
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Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
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I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I should die
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson