Depression

“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.