21 pages • 42 minutes read
Sonia SanchezDepression
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“Depression” is a free verse, unmetered poem composed of irregular line and stanza lengths. It is a poem in two parts. Section 1 is 20 lines divided across three stanzas. Section 2 is one stanza of 11 lines. The poem is four stanzas of 31 lines in total.
Regarding the difference between formal poetry and free verse, Sanchez says, “all free verse has form” (“Lucille Clifton & Sonia Sanchez: Mirrors and Windows.” YouTube, uploaded by Cave Canem Foundation, October 19 2016). The form of “Depression” communicates some truths about the reality of being depressed. The speaker is too depressed to adhere to a regular line length, stanza length, or section length, much less a rhyme scheme or meter. Questions arise at irregular intervals—two questions in Stanza 3, one in Stanza 4. All of this creates a form of intentional disarray.
Nonetheless, “Depression” shows some regularity. Both Sections 1 and 2 begin with the phrase “I have” (Lines 1, 21). This shows the reader that there is a cyclical pattern to the chaos. Enjambment follows its own logic. Line breaks frequently happen in the middle of sentences, but enjambment rarely disrupts phrases. Take the lines, “I hear the moon daring / to dance these rooms” (Lines 27-28) as an example. Together, they make up a complete sentence. Separate, the reader can still understand what is happening: the moon is daring, dancing is happening in the rooms.
Formally, this poem relies heavily on the title. The lone word “Depression” gives the reader much-needed context to understand what is happening in the actual poem. Sanchez includes a couple of common images associated with depression, such as crying all night and shutting the world out. However, it is the title that tells the reader in Line 1 that the speaker going into her eyes is a hopeless act, rather than a meditative or nostalgic one.
Capitalization and Punctuation
Sanchez uses nonstandard capitalization to communicate the speaker’s mental state throughout the poem. Sometimes she follows conventions. The first letter of each stanza is the first letter of a sentence, and they are all capitalized. In Stanza 3, when the speaker questions who or what she is, the speaker uses a lowercase “i” to refer to herself twice: “Am i a voice delighting in the sand?” (Line 14) and “i shed my clothes” (Line 17). In the second instance, the word “i” is also the first word of a sentence. The following line is another question: “am I a seed consumed by breasts” (Line 18). Here the speaker returns to a standard, capitalized “I,” but she fails to capitalize the first letter of the first word of the sentence. These moves demonstrate how small and disoriented the speaker feels. As she questions her personhood, she forgets to use the capital “I” word for a person. It also shows her apathy—she does not care to follow grammatical conventions.
The speaker uses punctuation regularly and correctly. Periods, semicolons, commas, colons, and exclamation points show that the speaker understands how to build a sentence. She uses the poetic “O” once: “O to become a star” (Line 29). Sometimes she fails to use punctuation and uses a line break instead. For example, she uses a line break instead of a comma at the end of Line 21: “I have cried all night / tears pouring out of my forehead” (Lines 21-22). Sometimes this creates ambiguity. For example, in “blankets that cover sweat / nudging into sheets” (Lines 9-10), it is unclear whether the blankets or the sweat are doing the nudging. A comma could clear up this confusion in a way that a line break cannot. However, the depressed speaker does not care too much to clarify, creating a sense of surrealness and disorientation that reflects her distressed mental state.
Imagery
The speaker in “Depression” moves from abstract image to abstract image, creating an impressionistic picture of her mental state. Consider the first few lines of Stanza 3: “Am i a voice delighting in the sand? / Look how the masks rock on the winds / moving in tune to leaves” (Lines 14-16).
The speaker provides no context for the sand, masks, or leaves of these lines. There is no setting or explanation that these items all come from a single memory, for example. The reader has to take these items at face value and consider their associations. The sand might mean a shore or a desert, or else the sands of time. A voice is disembodied and ephemeral. As soon as the listener stops hearing it, it ceases to exist. Therefore, the speaker must be wondering if she still has a body.
Masks are false faces put on to hide real ones. They might belong to the speaker or others. Either way, their actions are pleasant: They rock gently in a breeze. They move in harmony with the nature around them. This false niceness does little for the speaker. In the next line, she responds by stripping more protective layers away: “i shed my clothes” (Line 17). Taken in sequence, the readers sees a speaker disembodied who either cannot or will not participate in the false mask dance of happiness.
