The title does some quiet damage before the poem even starts. A bed is where we are supposed to recover, and calling it a coffin turns rest into burial. It suggests a speaker who can no longer tell lying down from giving up. What follows is a portrait of depression built almost entirely out of weight, and the poem keeps coming back to that idea.
The first stanza gives sadness mass. It "pulls on my heart," thoughts become "iron chains," and the next lines push the exaggeration further: "every movement feels like carrying the earth on my fingertips." The image is precise in its cruelty. Fingertips are the lightest, most delicate part of the body, so the picture is of a planet balanced on the smallest possible point, where even a small gesture costs enormous effort. The chains tie her "to my hatred," but the poem never says what or whom she hates. The grammar makes hatred sound like a post she is tethered to, and I read it as turned inward, though the text leaves that open.
The poem's most interesting move is a change of pronoun. After the first stanza "I" disappears, and a "happy little girl" takes over, followed by "she" and "her." The speaker seems to step outside herself and look at what is left, "the shell of what once was" a child. A shell is a container with nothing in it, which fits the exhaustion of the opening. The memory of that child is oddly phrased: she skips "through feels of cotton." Whether "feels" is deliberate or a slip for "fields," it works. Happiness is remembered as a texture, soft and weightless, which is the opposite of the earth on the fingertips. Then comes the drop to "different levels of hell," a plural that makes despair a staircase with more than one landing. The stanza ends on a line that sounds like the moral of a fairy tale, that what she searched for "was hers all along." Placed after hell, it lands as bitter rather than comforting. Knowing the answer was inside her does nothing to lift the chains.
The third stanza turns from weight to drying out. "The draught of her mind" is a cold current of air, but the word sits close to "drought," and either way the effect is the same: a painting "dries up" and summer leaves "shrivel and die." The mind becomes a climate that kills colour, and the painting hints at creativity going with it. Summer matches the girl's lost season. Then the sound changes: "crunched by the crushing weight of a human." The hard consonants of "crunched" and "crushing" echo each other, and the reader almost hears dead leaves under a boot. "A human" is a strangely cold phrase, and the poem does not say whether this crushing comes from other people or from the speaker herself.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation, and every line begins in lowercase. It opens with a slow, even tread ("The weight of my sadness pulls on my heart") and then loosens into longer, run-on lines. The stanzas shrink and settle into three lines each after the opening pair. With no full stops, a thought never gets to end, which suits a mind that cannot stop circling.
The ending is the most telling part. Water enters for the first time with "a wave of anger," after all that iron, earth and dust. The wish that follows is very modest: "a board to float on." She does not ask for rescue or a ship, only for something to keep her up. Even the grammar is cautious. "Will be" is the poem's only gesture toward the future, and it is immediately handed over to "if only the universe would grant it." The poem stops without a full stop, with nothing resolved.
That honesty is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not offer a cure or a neat lesson. It turns an invisible feeling into things we can picture (chains, a planet, dry paint, dead leaves), and it gives the last word to a small, unfinished hope.