I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind

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.