Having It Out with Melancholy

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1992

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Loneliness and Depression

Kenyon explores the loneliness and separation from loved ones that people experience during depressive episodes by highlighting firsthand experience: Depression hides in her nursey until everyone else leaves and then “presse[s]” into her (Line 4), ensuring that there are no other witnesses with direct knowledge of depression’s hold. Depression also comes between her and her mother to the point where Kenyon feels she only appears “to belong to my mother” (Line 15). In reality, she belongs to her depression (Line 19). Because nobody picks up on her illness during her childhood, she does not feel she can confide in them.

Even if other people know about Kenyon’s depression, it does not mean they would comprehend. One friend rudely tells Kenyon, who establishes a desire to have a relationship with God earlier in the poem, that she “wouldn’t be so depressed, / if you really believed in God” (Lines 28-29). These lines make up all of Section 3. The section’s shortness emphasizes the words’ profound impact on Kenyon, increasing her guilt and loneliness. The shortness may also hint that the words hurt Kenyon enough to distance her from the advising friend. With the subsequent lack of interjections from other people in Kenyon’s life in the rest of the poem, one may also read the section’s brevity as an indication that the negative comment is actively deterring Kenyon from confiding in others.

Around those who understand and accept, Kenyon still feels guilt and shame. She does not feel present enough to give her loved ones what she wants to give. Kenyon “dispatches obligations haltingly, or not at all” (Lines 61-62). Rather than a whole person, she becomes “a piece of burnt meat” in clothing during her depressive episodes (Lines 59-60). Depression snatches her from the rest of humanity floating in “the great / river of light” (Lines 37-47).

Kenyon misses out on bonding opportunities. She retreats to bed following dinner, feels unable to call for professional help, sleeps rather than do anything else, and has difficulty just talking.

Even when Kenyon returns “to marriage and friends” after a depressive period, guilt twists into her descriptions (Line 73). Kenyon frames her return as a pardon “for a crime she did not commit” (Lines 70-72). Kenyon does not wish or choose to have depression, yet she feels her relationships will suffer the consequences.

The Compatibility of Science and Christianity

Kenyon clarifies at the beginning of “Having It Out with Melancholy” that neither medication nor religious faith will completely eradicate her depression. Her medication list in the second stanza, for instance, echoes back to the poem’s opening quote.

Likewise, Kenyon’s depression makes her combative with God at times. In Stanza 3, one of Kenyon’s friends implies that true faith in God would completely heal her depression. However, Kenyon clearly and truly believes in God. She bluntly states in the first section that her depression “ruined my manners with God” (Line 12). Manners makes it appear that Kenyon possesses a personal, if deferential and imperfect, relationship with God.

While neither religion nor medication can completely eradicate her depression, both help her through it. Kenyon radically proposes that Christianity and science can peacefully co-exist. Faith and science are frequently at odds or related through contrast in American pop and mass culture.

Kenyon creates an illusion of time by breaking the poem into sections. At different points throughout this time frame, Kenyon brings up or takes medication. When her depression recedes at the end, she implies this regiment of medication helped bring her to this point. “There is something you can do if you have mood disorders,” Kenyon told journalist Bill Moyer. “There are medications that help people” (Kenyon 159).

Kenyon also links God to nature in the poem’s first section:

You taught me to exist without gratitude.

You ruined my manners towards God:

We’re here simply to wait for death;

the pleasures of the earth are overrated (Lines 11-14).

Framed by gratitude, Kenyon paints the natural world as God’s gift to humanity. The colon after God makes the lines following it seem like specific examples of her ruined manners. She does not express gratitude for God’s gift, the natural world. She denies this gifts’ existence as she states, “We’re here simply to wait for death” (Line 13). However, nature helps her throughout the poem. Most notably, it appears as her dog. The pet seeks her out and then rests his head on her foot.

When Kenyon’s depressive spell ends, she highlights both the presence of medication and nature. “High on Nardil and June light,” she wakes up and waits eagerly for the wood thrush’s song (Line 91):

Easeful air

presses through the screen

with the wild, complex song

of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment (Lines 94-98).

She loves listening to the bird’s song so much that she feels free and joy in existence.

By placing the antidepressant medication and the bird song near each other, Kenyon displays how both work in tandem, without hindering each other, to help her to manage her depression.

Agency / Predetermination

In literary criticism, scholars use the word “agency” to describe a character’s ability to make choices. The concerns about agency and free will fuel Kenyon’s feelings throughout “Having It Out with Melancholy.” Kenyon believed her bipolar disorder to be a matter of genetics. She references this by stating that her depression invaded her life at an early age and took complete control, and she portrays depression this way to drive home how depression takes away her agency.

Her depression taints her life and teaches her to be ungrateful. Even though she wants to have a relationship with God, she feels she no longer has agency to do so. She feels at times like burnt meat and like a puppet, suggesting that she’s an object being acted upon. As depression’s hostage, she doesn’t even have the will to call for help.

Despite feeling that depression controls her, she finds little ways to rebel. She chooses to listen to her dog’s breathing, for instance. This moment of commune and love saves her and gives her reason to continue living. Likewise, her decision to use medication allows her to reenter the world at times. The poem ends with her “overcome / by ordinary contentment” after waking early to hear the wood thrush bird’s song (Lines 97-98).