I felt a Cleaving in my Mind −
As if my Brain had split −
I tried to match it − Seam by Seam −
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before −
But Sequence raveled out of Sound
Dickinson uses a domestic metaphor, almost pushing the speaker of the poem into the position of a seamstress. The metaphor continues, comparing the speaker’s “Brain” to cloth that would not “fit” together. When sewing, one of the most important things is to make sure the patterns and seams line up together flawlessly. No matter what, however, something sewn together is always going to be the product of two things fused into one. Due to the “Cleaving [of the] Mind,” the speaker has, unarguably, two separate parts of the “Mind”. 
 It becomes evident that there is a strong yearn to “make them fit” together, flawlessly, as if a way to ignore the initial “split” and view the “Mind” as one. Here, the speaker has a conscious awareness of the situation; he/she does not reject any notions of a mental breakdown or a psychological collapse, but rather so works for a solution. The effort into fixing the problem at hand implies that he/she desires normalcy and sanity. Structurally, the stanza ends with a concise and direct phrase; the period also adds to the bluntness of the line, which emphasizes the fixed nature of the “Mind”. 
 Dickinson suggests that no matter what factors come into play, there will always be a “Cleaving in [the] Mind — As if [the] Brain had split”. 

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