Mark Anthony Cayanan's Except You Enthrall Me

To Liberate Through Enthrallment In Mark Anthony Cayanan's Except You Enthrall Me, the author uses a variety of personas in his poems to strategically impart to his readers not only his most personal emotions and desires, but also his fictional expressions as well. Hence, the many-sided and often contradictory aspects of the persona reveal both the struggle of the author in the transformation of the actual to the true and his attempt to escape from his emotions and his personality through his personas. In closely reading his two poems: "Ugly Feelings" and "Mission Statement", the readers will not only understand the meaning which Cayanan wishes to impart, but also realize how the strategies such as enjambment, synecdoche, repetition, and diminishment work together to illustrate the persona used in the poems. As a matter of fact, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of …show more content…
Hence, he entitles his book: Except You Enthrall Me which is a line lifted from John Donne's Holy Sonnets. The persona in Holy Sonnets speaks to God and demands Him to treat him so violently− he's been deprived of God's attention to the point that he craves for it with incredible intensity. The persona himself is fond of paradoxes and double meanings as revealed in the line: "Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me." The persona wishes to be liberated but at the same time ravished into spiritual chastity. On the other hand, Cayanan reveals his struggle with his own self-discovery and like the persona in Holy Sonnets, he wishes to be liberated. For this reason, Cayanan's persona in his poems possess different aspects− emotional, disingenuous, ravishing and ravishes, among others because he himself has been overcome by intense emotions. In effect, the author translates his different emotions in the different personas as some sort of purgation as a means of cathartic