The Role of Religious Faith and Personal Spirituality
The issue of religion in “Having it Out with Melancholy” appears minor in comparison to the overriding descriptions of and meditations on what life is like for a woman suffering from severe depression. By far, the themes in this poem center on the speaker’s desperate attempt to be normal, to go through a day without sadness and dread, a day without hopelessness and drugs that sometimes work and sometimes do not. Her consideration of religious faith seems fleeting, at best, even cynical, as she bluntly announces her friend’s opinion that she “wouldn’t be so depressed” if only she believed in God. She allows this reprimand only two lines, then dismisses it to return to further lamentation on her own misery. Perhaps this summation is too hasty and based only on the poem’s surface, or on what the speaker says instead of what she implies. A closer look may reveal that these two lines are the most powerful in the entire work and that spirituality is actually a primary concern of the woman’s, as evidenced by the religious imagery and innuendoes she scatters throughout this story of her tragic life.
It seems that, since birth, the cards of gloom have been stacked against this speaker who claims she belonged more to depression’s “anti-urge” than to her mother as an infant. The entire first section hangs on the notion that memories from the crib really do exist and that some are so strong, so torturous, that the grown-up can recall them vividly even at the distance of middle age. Also, in this first part, the speaker sneaks in the first allusion to religious piety, professing that her “manners toward God” were “ruined” in childhood and blaming depression for destroying them. What manners does she mean? It is an odd term to apply to one’s relationship with a supreme being, but, in the sense that this is a child’s relationship, the word likely implies a little girl’s obedience and good behavior toward such things as saying her prayers or not giggling in church or in believing Heaven is a beautiful, gilded city somewhere above the clouds. Because her manners are ruined, she does not believe in anything other than sadness, despair, and eventual death. At least, that is what she would have her readers presume.
The speaker makes no more mention of God or religious faith until the two little lines that make up section three of the poem. The message in them comes as somewhat a shock for its abrupt, almost brutal context, but here again the speaker implies, through the words of her friend, that she has no faith in God. Then, the subject is dropped as quickly as it arises, but that may be misleading. The speaker returns to the subject—if not specifically, then emblematically—by the end of her story. So, too, will this writing.
First, it is interesting to take a look at other religious allusions that appear in the poem, such as in the fifth section in which the speaker employs symbols of light and darkness, peace and violence to describe a time of welcomed reprieve in her ongoing battle with mental illness. She imagines herself “a speck of light in the great / river of light,” a metaphor seemingly built around images of God or Christ whose presence glows, emanating upon human beings who are faithful followers. Her moment in the light of a supreme being is cut short by the return of melancholy, represented this time by a “crow who smells hot blood.” Crows, of course, are black, and they often symbolize the dark presence...
(This entire section contains 1454 words.)
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of evil or some lurking terror. The speaker’s peace of mind, then, is wrenched from her the way a demonic creature may yank a helpless victim from the godlike “glowing stream” in which she finally feels secure. Even the words she attributes to melancholy—“‘I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear / ones drown!’”—sound as though they could come from the mouth of God in a modern interpretation of the Bible. The irony, of course, is that this time the savior is more like Satan.
Other than section three, the strongest suggestions regarding religion and spirituality in this poem appear in section eight, the very name of which may be a direct reference to the Apostles of Christ. One definition of “credo” is simply “creed,” which usually implies a formal statement of religious belief or an open confession of faith. But, “Credo,” when capitalized, refers to the “Apostle’s Creed,” or the Christian system of belief as ascribed to the twelve Apostles and often used in some church services today. The statements that make up this section may be seen as the speaker’s confession of what she believes in, and she appears forthright about it: “I believe only in this moment / of well-being.” The defiance in these words is unmistakable. Believing only in the moment at hand directly conflicts with the Christian notion of having faith in eternity, but the speaker explains her reasoning just as candidly as she states her creed: “Unholy ghost, / you are certain to come again.” Notice the explicit allusion to spirituality here, as the woman compares her illness to the anti-Christ, or the polar opposite of the Holy Ghost. She accuses depression of being like a demonic force, able to possess her and turn her “into someone who can’t / take the trouble to speak; someone / who can’t sleep, or who does nothing / but sleep.” In other words, she is completely helpless against this demon that has taken over her mind and, apparently, her soul. She plucks language and tone straight from the Bible in her final resigning line: “When I awake, I am still with thee.”
“Having it Out with Melancholy” may end on a more positive note than it begins, but the continuous roller coaster ride of clinical depression makes it clear that a downhill dip is just around the corner. The speaker must find something beyond her own physical being, beyond the chemical make-up of her brain in order, simply, to live. This brings readers back to section three—that tiny part of the poem that holds the weight of its message. The suggestion from a friend obviously implies that the speaker does not really believe in God, but the contention of this essay is that she really does. She spends too much time in the poem making references to religious entities and spiritual needs not to have them count for something—for quite a lot, actually. Section three is brief for a reason: it says it all. It encompasses what is at the heart of the speaker’s most basic concern and her most dire need: finding comfort in a world of personal torture, reaching a spiritual heaven in spite of her physical and mental hell. So, this section is ultimately ironic. If she did not believe in God, she would not waste time agonizing over the gulf that the illness has created between her real self—the happy, content, and spiritual individual she wants to be— and the tired, disillusioned woman she sees in the mirror most every day. If she did not believe in God, then bringing up the subject, from childhood through adulthood, would not be necessary. But, the memories she describes and the thoughts she confesses clearly indicate that the subjects of God and personal spirituality are foremost in this speaker’s troubled mind.
Looking at “Having it Out with Melancholy” from the religious perspective provides a possible alternative to a context that seems overburdened with one sad detail after another of the speaker’s life and her battle with depression. Without an underlying theme, the poem may falter into a somber diary of a woman’s chronic problems, as benign and defeating as the list of prescription drugs that makes up half of section two. But, much more is going on in this poem, and the main theme of how important it is to recognize the beauty and peacefulness in something as natural and simple as a bird’s song is complemented well by the role that personal faith may play in that recognition. It is, after all, the unequivocal eye of the wood thrush that the speaker claims to love, and this notion of having no doubts, no ambiguities, must be one she would love to apply to her self as well.
Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “Having it Out with Melancholy,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department.
The Connection Between Faith and Mental Illness
Carefully divided into nine sections, Jane Kenyon’s poem, “Having it Out with Melancholy,” from her 1993 collection entitled Constance, is a personal and detailed account of living with depression. Throughout the poem, Kenyon marries this struggle with concepts that surround the understanding of faith. Kenyon writes that depression and faith are linked and connected. However, she appears to be unclear in her conclusions about this connection. Does she believe, as the third section suggests through its one couplet, that one’s strong faith can heal depression? Is Kenyon’s point that treasuring the simple moments during depression, like following the dog’s breathy rhythm found in section six, brings greater peace than any ritual of faith? Or, is it her main purpose to show depression and faith as almost synonymous forces at work in one’s life since, as the first section states, birth? Instead of focusing on one possibility, she introduces various relationships. In this way, the emphasis is not on the cause and effect of these two almost intangibles, but the fact that both faith and mental illness can be connected in any number of ways. Kenyon makes this deliberate connection to show the mystery both hold within the experience of living. One way she does this is through the titles of her sections. Three of the nine sections are titled with religious terminology. By titling one third of her sections with terms commonly used in religious circles, Kenyon demonstrates the connection of faith and depression as a strong emphasis in the poem.
The first section with a title of religious inference is section 5. Kenyon titles this section, “Once There Was Light,” preparing the reader for an experience of creation or epiphany. Perhaps her story will be like the one told in Genesis in the Bible and surely with the light will come a revelation. What does come with this section is Kenyon’s most upbeat and optimistic of all her nine sections. The light that she is writing about is a moment of amazing clarity, where she is removed from her mental illness and connected to every other being. Here, she is removed from her melancholy and brought to “the great / river of light that undulates through time.”
What she then describes in this river could be seen as an image of Heaven:
I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors—those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born.
In her enlightened state, she can see those who came before her and those who will follow. She can see her place in the picture of creation and the beauty of the shared experience of life and faith. In addition, she is “completely calm” in this experience and “no longer hate[s] having to exist.” Kenyon is writing of a perfect experience, in many ways an experience of Heaven. In the first three stanzas of the poem, she is removed from struggle and granted peace.
This section was based on a true experience for Kenyon. As she said to Bill Moyers in a 1993 interview that can be found in her book A Hundred White Daffodils, “I really had a vision of that once.... I relaxed into existence in a way that I never had before.” This heaven-like vision allowed her the opportunity to appreciate the world in which she lived and remove herself from the confines of depression. In the Bill Moyers interview, she continues to clarify the image by saying that “after having this wave of buoyant emotion, my understanding was changed fundamentally.” Yet, even with this changed understanding and her image of an euphoric heaven, Kenyon ends this fifth section with an abrupt removal out of the experience.
According to the Bill Moyers interview in A Hundred White Daffodils, Kenyon herself supposed that this change was due to a bad crash following an episode of mania. Still, Kenyon leaves this final stanza in this section and compares her illness to a black crow pulling her out of her few moments of clarity. She personifies depression as a crow “who smells hot blood,” and then talks with the crow as if they have a personal relationship. Kenyon shows herself to have a personal relationship to depression and not, as the third section advised, with God. It appears in this stanza that depression has become the unknown force in which Kenyon is forced to believe. The crow acts as a savior, rescuing the speaker from “the glowing stream” and reasons to the speaker that he is saving her from drowning, “‘I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear / ones drown!’” Yet, neither the reader nor the speaker wants to be pulled away or saved by this force because this rescue removes the peace and reinstates melancholy. Though Kenyon has been given a life-altering experience and a glimpse at Heaven, she has been brought by her illness back to a state of despair.
It is in this despair that Kenyon begins her first stanza of the section titled “Pardon.” Thus titled, the reader awaits the absolution, forgiveness, and perhaps penance. Before the pardon, the speaker must confess to what pains her or perhaps, one could say, her “sins.” Sin can be viewed as separation from God. Kenyon shows depression to be a separation from self. While depressed, the speaker sees herself as “[a] piece of burned meat” who is “tired of trying / to be stouthearted, tired / beyond measure.” This is Kenyon’s confession to the debilitating effect that this illness places on her and her life. This first stanza reiterates the speaker’s struggle with her separation from self (and from God) that is shown throughout the first four sections of this poem. By placing the pardon in the second half of the poem (and the second half of this section), she begins to bring relief. As a condition of the pardon, her penance is in the form of the “monoamine oxidase inhibitors.”
As in the poem’s second section, the speaker is again at the mercy of prescribed cures for her illness. By placing these drugs in the section called “Pardon,” Kenyon parallels the day to day use of drugs to a minister’s advice for removing oneself from sinful behavior. These prescriptions remove the pain and the sin “[of] a crime she did not commit.” Kenyon is grateful for the relief the penance of drugs brings. Yet, she views this pardon as partially undeserved, resenting the way depression removed her from life without her consent or permission.
She has been isolated, and now with the assistance of drugs, can return to the normalcy of life. With this, forgiveness comes. The speaker finds solace in the common parts of life. Forgiveness comes in the small and detailed portions; “marriage and friends . . . pink fringed hollyhocks . . . desk, books, and chair.”
Once in drug therapy, she can see clearly what it is she believes in, and so her next section begins. Kenyon titles section 8 “Credo,” and with this, a Christian reader might await a litany of what Kenyon believes, like creeds found in so many churches. What Kenyon gives, however is not a list of several beliefs, but belief in one thing “this moment / of well being.” In making her belief compromise the second line and part of the third of the first stanza in the section, Kenyon gives the reader her belief for only a moment. It is obviously the moment that is so important to her. In section 5, Kenyon’s calm comes only “[f]or a few / moments.” In section 9, the moment will return as “ordinary contentment.” This well-being is brief and unpredictable, but it is where Kenyon maintains her faith.
Kenyon begins to resign herself to the constancy of her depression and to the brief moments of release she will have from it. In her “An Interview with Bill Moyers” found in A Hundred White Daffodils, Kenyon connects her belief in the moment with her belief in God. In this interview she says, “[w]hen you get to be my age and you’ve lived with depression for a number of years, you begin to have a context for believing that you will feel better at some point.” In this way, she resolves herself to her illness and to God’s presence in this. In the same Moyers interview, Kenyon states that when depressed she can think about faith by calling out to God, and these moments of being better or even the belief that she will feel better eventually become the answer from God. In this way, Kenyon reveals to the reader “a God who, if you ask, forgives you no matter how far down in the well you are.” This is the God she tells Moyers in the interview she was introduced to in her later years.
These moments of absolution must sustain her through her illness, because as the section suggests, depression becomes the “[u]nholy ghost . . . certain to come again.” Kenyon shows there is nothing redeemable about depression. She personifies depression as “[c]oarse, mean” and immobilizing. Depression is ever present. The speaker says “[t]here is nothing I can do / against your coming.” Yet, by titling the section “Credo,” Kenyon shifts the focus from the paralysis of depression to the possibility of clarity in the future. The illness is not a punishment from God but something that God will help her overcome.
“Having it Out with Melancholy” is an intensely intimate observation of Kenyon’s relationship to mental illness. Her carefully crafted language describes the various conflicts and connections between mental illness, traditional beliefs, and personal experience. Though personal to her, these nine sections provide universal insights into the struggles of the mentally ill. In the process, she offers hope through her keen attention to the simple details like, God, dogs, and a wood thrush, hope that can help every person survive.
Source: Kate Covintree, Critical Essay on “Having it Out with Melancholy,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2003. Covintree is a graduate of Randolph-Macon Women’s College with a degree in English.
