Sara Teasdale’s speaker looks squarely at mortality. She knows her body will be destroyed and that no one, not even someone who loves life as fiercely as she does, can escape. The things she would miss are intensely physical and immediate: rain-soaked orchards, the sea, long still hours that feel more reliable than prayer. That awareness of loss could be despairing, but the poem turns defiant instead. Because darkness is coming, she wants to meet it with pride, not fear—like a wave sweeping to shore, singing until her last breath. In the closing lines, life itself becomes her lover, and death an opponent she hopes to outwit somehow. The mood is urgent, passionate, and strangely buoyant: grief at leaving the world is transformed into a last, resolute embrace of being alive.
"Since There Is No Escape" — Summary
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.