I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind

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.