“Escape”- by Nina Cassian
“Escape” is a poem addressing the age-old, yet somehow more modern, issue of unhappy and detrimental yet addictive relationships. The form, showing the effects of this relationship and her awakening from it, along with the dark, sometimes even morbid, diction and imagery make the poem a very personal and touching one; subsequently it also helps the reader relate to his own experience, thus proving to be very effective.
The diction and the literary devices generally set the mood in “Escape”; the poem begins with two rather shocking contradictions in which Cassian compares “his love” to a “prison” ( these two not being commonly associated in our society) and proclaims that “His words and looks” were like “padlocks”. To a certain extent, this immediately shows her addiction to him, at that time either conscious or subconscious, as, although she claims that “he locked me in”, she herself could not, or did not want to open these “padlocks”. Moreover, I think that they covey a feeling of claustrophobia for the reader, thus persuading him to immediately notice how harmful this relationship was for the poet. The description of how she lost her senses, becoming “blind and mute”, makes us understand her helplessness, her entrapment as without those vital senses there was little she could do to “escape”. Everything around her is distorted, as she is unable to tell “a curtain from a river” (therefore the indoors and the outdoors) apart. As the poem progresses, her senses become increasingly deformed and she creates a morbid, almost frightening image for the reader, by declaring that she could not see the difference between “a bracelet and a muzzle”, conveying the idea of death as a muzzle is associated with guns. Nonetheless, the poet seems to also be having a feeling of longing at the same time, as she mentions “the call of the pomegranate seed or that kind invitation of frogs into the sunset” which are reminiscent of the Romanian countryside, considering that those are her native lands. The concluding line of the stanza highlights the overall effect this transformation has had on her as she “lost a lot of friends”; the caesura underlines that this is the direct result of everything she has mentioned throughout the stanza.
