Mod Indigo Poem

“Mood Indigo” by Williams Matthews is a poem that paints a picture about a girl who seems to battle her depression. There is evidence in the poem that let the reader know that the little girl lives on a farm. The reader can conclude that the girl is young because she is still in school. Although, it is quit unaware as to why the girl is depressed. William Matthews conveys the girl’s sorrow throughout the poem with figurative language, word choice, repetition, and symbolism. The theme of this poem was hard to grasp by the first read. I had to reread it a number of times to figure out what were going on with the little girl in the story. I concluded that it was some emotion that was troubling the girl throughout the poem.

This is to say it was always there, and it came from nowhere. (14-15) I focused on this line in the poem as which comes off as a riddle to draw a conclusion and use other lines in the poem to figure out what is going on. I concluded that sadness or depression is always there and it comes out of nowhere. I used lines twenty-five to twenty-seven to make more sense of my conclusion. A Girl’s dead pet, lost love and a sister dead at birth symbolize the emotion of sadness and depression. In the beginning of the poem Matthew starts the reader off in the poem with an image of the girls brother’s playing around the farm from the porch to the hayrick. He then describes the brother’s lungs as they laugh and inhale dirt by using simile together starting with lines 2 to 3:
Brothers hid and chortled and Slurped into their young pink
Lungs the ash-blond dusty air that lay above the bales
Like low cloud; and from the squeak and suck (2-3)

The reader grasp an image of the brother’s pink lungs inhaling a blond color ash that it’s so low for the brothers to inhale it that he describes the dusty air as low like clouds. Another simile is line sixteen where Matthew compares the girl’s depression to a