Here's a more meditative poem on the same subject called
Depression Beginning in 1956.
This mood is not mirrored in the weather raining,
nor can it be cured by the usual remedies.
It is a mood unlike the geography of rivers,
without a source, all to general,
like a conversation with a stranger, a way of living
you've adjusted to.
Only you haven't shaken the feeling something's wrong.
Your wife is off with someone else
where you would like to be.
Your father's sitting in a chair one
July is a thought you have now, in a time before air
conditioners, sweating through his shirt.
You think what he is thinking.
Should he buy a new house, get a divorce?
Should he vote for a Democrat who has no chance to win?
Should he help your mother in the kitchen,
though he doesn't want to see her again?
He's not sitting in that chair now, so he must have moved
or something moved in him.
The lesson you want to learn is how we change ourselves, how
we move from past to future.
If we follow the movement of the flowers and the trees,
which we don't, we would know it's not through consciousness.
The lilac that blooms at night knows nothing about change.
Nor is it something large what we do in the eyes of others.
What do the branches care for the leaves
when they grow up or down?
And yet your father is remarried,
he voted for a Democrat, he's somewhere else in Arizona, free
of trees.
At last, something good is happening to him.
Why couldn't it be your mood that's changed?
What would it take to remove yourself from this feeling?
There is this weight of the present mode of helplessness.
It's not a great disaster that makes us change,
but a strengthening of will combined with circumstance.
Nature has nothing to do with it now,
though it might have in the past when
we understood the motion of animals against the trees.
We are not animals now, nor could we choose to be.
Though we choose sometimes the pastoral and lovely,
it is never quite enough to leave the melancholy
we've come to know.
And if that mood should pass, we think
it was some miracle or strength or someone
else we love coming to our aid.
And we'd be wrong in part and right
in ways we can't define in love or sometimes change.