Since There Is No Escape by Sara Teasdale
Sara Teasdale about Death
Since there is no escape, since at the end
My body will be utterly destroyed,
This hand I love as I have loved a friend,
This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;
Since there is no escape even for me
Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:
The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea
And hours alone too still and sure for prayer —
Since darkness waits for me, then all the more
Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore
In pride; and let me sing with my last breath;
In these few hours of light I lift my head;
Life is my lover — I shall leave the dead
If there is any way to baffle death.Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
Since There is No Escape is a modernist poem by the American writer Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), published in the 1920 anthology: Flame and Shadow.
Since There Is No Escape, possibly one of Sara Teasdale’s best poems, develops a very human concern: the impossibility of escaping death.
In any case, the most difficult thing is to accept that there is no escape, and that none of us is the exception. Already at the end of the poem, even after admitting that impossibility, Sara Teasdale wonders if, after all, perhaps there isn’t some other way, not just to avoid death, but to cheat it.
