Barely two dozen words, and the poem still stages a small drama: a bewildered question, a mountain, a hidden exit, and a leap that goes the wrong way. The title, "Escape route," is the first clue. On a mountain, an escape route is the planned way off when things go badly, the line you note in advance in case of weather or exhaustion. Here the route turns out not to lead down at all.
The opening lines sound disoriented. "where are we come to" is slightly off-kilter grammar. "Are come" has an old-fashioned ring, like a traveller in a much older story, and "come to" also means to regain consciousness. The poem may begin with someone waking to find the situation already around them, though that is an inference from the phrasing rather than a stated fact. There is no question mark, so the question doesn't expect an answer. The next line, "what high rough peak," isn't a full sentence. It could be a question or an exclamation, and the speaker seems both to ask and to gasp. Three stressed monosyllables sit together in "high rough peak," and the reader can't glide over them. The sounds are heavy and uneven, as if each word were a foothold. The pronoun matters too. The first stanza is "we," a group sharing a predicament.
The white space between the stanzas works like a pause for breath, and then the poem changes shape. "having in my book a secret door to the night" is by far the longest line, about twelve syllables against the compressed lines before it. It also begins with a participle, "having," that hangs in the air without a main verb, so the sentence leans forward until the last line catches up. The "we" has become "I," and the speaker has stopped asking for help and started relying on a private resource.
The phrase "in my book" carries a double meaning. It is an idiom meaning "by my reckoning," a statement of personal conviction. It is also, literally, a book, the thing you hold and read. The poem never says which sense it means, and both work: a belief and an object, each offering a way out. The poem does not name the book or explain why it works, and that reticence suits something called "secret." The door opens "to the night," not into a room or a shelter, so what waits on the other side is vast, dark and open. A secret door is also one that doesn't appear on the map everyone else is using.
Then comes "I will fall up." Its four plain monosyllables read like a vow. For anyone on a high peak, "fall" is the most frightening word available, and the poem takes it and reverses it. The long line builds toward a drop, and "up" arrives as the last word where "down" should be. The phrase is a paradox, gravity turned upside down, and it can be read in several ways. Night sits above a mountaintop, so the escape from a high place is to go higher, toward the sky. We also say we "fall asleep" or "fall into" a book, so falling can mean surrender without terror. The future tense, "will," is confident, although the poem gives no evidence for that confidence.
Formally, the poem keeps almost nothing in place. It has no rhyme, no regular metre and no punctuation at all, not even a full stop, so it ends open, as though the speaker were still in motion. What holds it together is sound. The long *i* runs through "high," "my," "night" and "I," linking the peak, the book and the speaker, and it makes the voice seem to lift as it goes.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It sets a feeling of being lost and stranded against the idea that imagination, and reading in particular, offers a way out. The way out doesn't solve the problem or get you down the mountain. It changes direction. The poem also trusts its reader. It supplies no explanation of the book, the mountain or who "we" are, and it leaves the reader to decide whether the leap is an escape, a surrender or a kind of joy. For a student reader, it shows how line length, grammar and a single reversed word can carry an argument that a longer poem might spend pages making.