An analysis
The poem is about a girl escaping a constricting traditionalist household to pursue her own ambitions. It doesn’t specifically point out the aforesaid ambitions, but one could deduce from her ardent studying throughout the poem that she dreams of achieving a higher education. In addition, the poem mentions another woman, described as “the sage”, who helps the girl when her kin condemn her studies and throw out her books. From the stanzas in which the sage was introduced (“Still, despite the prison cage/Like Dantes she befriends a sage/Who recognized the same regime/Whose penalty her own crushed
dream/Books passed between their hands/In a shared gaze she understands”), the reader can unearth the similarity between the two characters, since they both had the same dreams, except one’s was incomplete, and the other’s about to be realized. The sympathy the sage has for the girl makes her an ally, and the girl realizes the reason for that, thus their understanding relationship. The ‘Dantes’ and ‘prison cage’ references are allusions to the famous French book The Count of Monte Cristo, where Edmond Dantes is an innocent man framed for a terrible crime, and thrown into prison for fourteen years. He meets a wise old abbe (the sage) who teaches the illiterate Dantes all he knows, and Dantes manages to escape (from this, we can now assume the girl to be a teenager, if you want to dig in further). We can draw similarities between the Dantes and the girl, such as their predicaments, one a literal prison, and the other a metaphorical one. He is innocent, yet considered a criminal because of his framers. She is innocent because she wants to chase her dreams, a criminal action in the eyes of her kindred, who frame her story. Dantes escaped and found great riches, and the girls escapes to pursue her dreams, akin to
riches in this case.