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.
Themes
The Overwhelming Experience of Despair
“Depression” is more than a poem about sadness—Sonia Sanchez depicts someone struggling with the hopelessness and despondence specific to this clinical condition. The speaker is physically uncomfortable, in pain and suffering, yet unable to move. The speaker uses a simile to communicate how this is possible: “As when drunken air molts in beds” (Line 8). She invites the reader to picture waves of sticky air “tumbling over blankets” (Line 9) on a sweaty body. If a person in bed is sweating, but the air outside of the bed is so humid as to be drunken and moving like waves, then getting out of bed is unlikely to bring relief. The speaker is trapped in this feeling whether she is in bed or not. She has no choice but to give in: “[S]o I have settled” (Line 11). Her despair is overwhelming and suffocating.
Sanchez uses abstract imagery to communicate the experience of being depressed to her audience. The images in this poem are rarely literal. Wheelbarrows cannot be “grotesque with wounds” (Line 12), and air cannot molt. By shutting her eyes, the speaker has not been transported to a literal other world of “waterless bones” (Line 4), rivers, and incense. The phrase “bones move / toward their rivers in incense” (Lines 4-5) is difficult to parse if read as a literal place where bones perform actions and have rivers. Rather than constructing an imaginary place, Sanchez accumulates words and phrases that have certain associations. For example, the word drunk in “drunken air” (Line 8) suggests heaviness and uncomfortable humidity, as well as desperate attempts to ease suffering. Molting suggests a messy process of slowly leaving pieces behind, resulting in a more vulnerable, softer, smaller creature. Interpreting the images separately builds a collage of emotions and sensations that add up to the experience of depression.
Caught in this state, Sanchez shows the speaker falling into patterns. She beings both sections with the same phrase: “I have” (Lines 1, 21), then describes her eyes, either shutting them or crying for an extended period of time. Tears are a classic symbol of sadness, but the speaker’s description of her eyes show a person beyond low-grade woe. The tears pour “out of [her] forehead” (Line 22), an unsettling description locating tears just above the eye sockets they should be falling from. What is more, not only has she shut her eyes against the world—she is trapped within herself, “bumping against sockets” (Line 2), watching a speck of light crawl out of reach. Finally, the speaker lets out an animal cry near the end of the poem: “Ayyyy!” (Line 26). By the end of the poem, the speaker has reached the frightening depths of the depression the speaker has yet to truly escape.
Entrapment Between Death and Birth
The poem alternates between sensations and images of birth and death, speaking to the surreal, liminal state the speaker finds herself in while struggling against depression. The speaker’s preoccupation with these contrasting forces reveals different aspects of her emotional state and depict depression as an entrapment between neither being truly alive nor truly dead.
Images throughout “Depression” give the impression of a speaker contemplating death. In the first stanza, she conjures funeral imagery. She describes “waterless bones” moving “toward their rivers in incense” (Lines 4-5). Waterless bones, taken in tandem with “under the sun” in Line 3, suggests ashes from a funeral pyre or a crematorium. Those smoked ashes float, like incense, toward the river. Rivers are often a means of travelling to the afterlife in mythology. Otherwise, in a non-spiritual context, the river could show the passage of time. This ever-moving, ever-changing body of water speaks of both literal mortality and the emotional “death” the speaker is experiencing in the midst of her depression. These morbid thoughts show how dire the speaker’s state of mind has become.
While the speaker’s morbid thoughts show her obsession with death, her thoughts on birth show her relationship to life. In one of her self-aware questions, she wonders if she is “a seed consumed by breasts” (Line 18). The seed represents something not truly born, as it is still dormant in its shell. Here she mourns her unrealized potential as a human being. She wonders again later if she was ever even born. Her cry, “Ayyyy!” (Line 26) transitions sonically into a homonym, “I” when she asks, “Am I born?” (Line 26). She elaborates further on her doubt: “I cannot peel the flesh” (Line 26). She has flesh, but she feels trapped in it. She wants to be free, of this state or of her fleshly form, but she ultimately cannot gain the control over her body necessary to realize this dream. Thus, she can neither feel fully dead nor fully alive, and is trapped in an emotional limbo. Feeling stifled and unrealized, the speaker longs for full transformation and release through death or a rebirth.
The Isolation and Insularity of Depression
“Depression” explores a speaker trapped inside her internal world, longing to escape into the great wide world. She begins the poem from inside her inner world, a miserable place where she bumps around in her own eye sockets. She spends her day in her head “smelling the evening” (Line 3), indicating her desire to participate in—and her continuing awareness of—the outer world. She feels hopelessly detached from this outer world. The poem thus reveals the centrality of isolation and insularity in depression.
Trapped in her inner world, the speaker loses track of who or what she is. She may be “a voice delighting in the sand” (Line 14), just a sound on some strange shore in her mind. She becomes disconnected from the present moment, consumed by tears that “run in silence to [her] birth” (Line 25), this lifelong pain taking over. If she were able to peel her flesh, then she would become a star. Stars are about as far from her current state as she could get. They are in outer space, far from any world she has known and dwelling in an isolation that is peaceful and under control. They are disembodied, not limited to a human form like her. The opposite of an unrealized seed, they are fully realized celestial bodies, “like gods” (Line 31). Finally, stars are part of something greater: galaxies and constellations, the great wonder of outer space. The speaker, isolated in the miserable corners of her mind, desires to be part of something much bigger and far, far away from her pain.
Sound is the speaker’s dominant sense in the poem. The speaker begins the poem by closing her eyes. No longer able to rely on sight, she bumps around in “sockets that sing” (Line 2), or that ring with pain at her clumsiness. She compares the wounds of wheelbarrows to sleigh bells, “small and insistent” (Line 13). This is an insidious combination of adjectives to use for a sound. A high-pitched sound may not be loud, but if it is ever-present, it can have a maddening effect. At one point, the speaker wonders if she has been reduced to nothing but a sound herself, a “voice delighting in the sand” (Line 14).
The tears in Section 2 pour out of her from a soul running “in silence” (Line 25) to her birth. She has already forfeited her sight, and silence threatens to isolate her further, so in the next line, she cries out: “Ayyyy!” (Line 26). This cry of anguish communicates her pain, and it is a way of pushing back against the silence. It is one of the tools of fighting depression she feels capable of using. Near the end of Section 2, sound is the key to her escape, if only in a fleeting thought. She knows the moon dares “to dance these rooms” only because she hears it. This reminder makes her dream of stars, suggesting that the speaker may have some inkling of hope—perhaps, she too, will one day feel as free and tranquil as a star.
