When I had journeyed half our life's way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah! It is hard to speak of what it was,
the savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:
so bitter--death is hardly more severe!

In the explanatory notes to the first canto of Dante's Inferno, poet and translator Allen Mandelbaum writes, "... the forest precedes the journey through Hell. It is the dark wood of life on earth when lived in sin; it is Dante's interior wood; and it is the wood of political darkness, of Florence, of Italy, of papal corruption, of the absence of imperial authority." Sure, the Inferno is a political work, with Dante condemning a number of politicians to hell, but one of the most interesting things about it is the way in which it can be interpreted. (I think the Inferno being an allegory for the nine months of pregnancy is a long stretch, but I'll entertain the idea. You can't really argue with the ways in which people make literature personal.) Admittedly, I've never given much thought to what the Inferno means to me--I tend to take what I read at face value, without really gleaning anything new or insightful about myself--but, while flipping through A. Alvarez's The Savage God, I suddenly hit upon the answer: maybe the Inferno, and particularly the first lines, is about depression and suicide.

I'll let you chew on that for a bit.