Having It Out with Melancholy

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.