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cleave

Craft Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Cleave means to split apart or to cling closely, depending on context; in poetry, it can suggest division, separation, or strong attachment.

Detailed Definition
The word has a double sense in English: to divide and to adhere. In poetry, this ambiguity makes it especially rich, allowing a single term to suggest both breaking and binding. It belongs in craft language because it evokes the forceful action of shaping matter and the emotional tension of relation.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poet may explore the double meaning of "cleave," which can mean both to split apart and to cling together; In poems about divorce or separation, cleave suggests painful splitting from a former union; Devotional poetry often uses cleave in its older sense of clinging closely, as in biblical language about spouses; A poet describing an axe splitting wood might use cleave to evoke both violence and utility; Cleave can describe how grief splits a person's sense of self into before and after; A poem about identity might explore how a person cleaves to one culture while feeling severed from another.
Additional Notes
Cleave is a notably contronymic craft term, since it can mean both to split apart and to cling together, and this inherent contradiction makes it a rich subject for close reading exercises; poets exploit this duality deliberately, often in poems about relationships or identity where separation and attachment coexist, and instructors should highlight the term's etymological history, since the two meanings derive from different Old English root words that happen to have merged in modern English; this ambiguity makes cleave a favorite term in devotional and marital poetry, where biblical language often uses it in the sense of clinging closely.
Also Known As
split divide sever hew chop
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