the discipline she experienced at its hand becomes the critical aspect of the narrative frame.  

The surface meaning of the poem is a reflection about how Piercy as a child experienced discipline in the form of beatings with a wooden yardstick.  From this, the sensory imagery utilized in the poem brings out the narrative frame of reference from the child's point of view.  The initial sight of the closet doors, "leaning together like gossips," establishes the exposition for the entirety of the poem.  The description of the vacuum bag as "stuffed with sausage" is another example of the sensory imagery in the poem, as is the detail of how she responded when she was beaten with the meter stick as one who "bellowed like a locomotive."

The imagery of the poem is one that combines a sense of oppression with liberation.  Both dynamics are critical to the appreciation of the poem.  The oppressive tendencies can be seen in the images of domesticity.  This is evident in the description of the speaker's mother's life with lines such as "to see my mother removing daily/ the sludge the air lay down like a snail's track" or "housewife scrubbing/  on raw knees as the factory rained ash."  This inward imagery of domesticity is contrasted with the extroverted pictures of liberation that is evident in the lines, "red and blue mountain/ ranges on a map that offered escape" and "I could travel to freedom when I grew."  In utilizing images that represent oppression and liberation, it becomes clear that Piercy is suggesting that her childhood was positioned between the world of expectation and conformity, representing the silencing of voice, and one of liberation and transformation, involving a departure from it. The poetic devices in the poem help to enhance the poem's thematic function.

The poem's themes reside in the struggle towards liberation.  The titular concept refers to a forcible repudiation of a contingency that silences voice. This repression is seen on two levels in the poem.  The first is the repression of women in the form of imposed domesticity.  The speaker of the poem reacts with intense rejection towards a life where she is told what to do and how to live:  "... as if weary of housework as I,/ who swore I would never dust or sweep." Her reaction is an indication that the predicament women face is one where they are forced into a life of domesticity with limited opportunities for freedom and voice.  It is an existence tethered to routine, denying freedom, and steeped in monotonous repetition.  The invocation of Sisyphus from the school lesson is reflective of how the speaker perceives domestic life.  The second level of repression exists in the parent/ child dynamic.  The child speaks of being beaten by both parents with the "wooden yardstick." Her breaking of the rule enables the speaker to move into "power gained."  The ability to assert her voice in the face of parental repression represents her voice authenticated and her narrative validated.  She has clearly established that she will not be Sisyphus in her act of breaking the yardstick.  It is this in which the "breaking out" element is most demonstrative. 

Piercy describes her writing as emerging from a singular vision.  It is a vision that she believes unifies her process and products of thought:  "I don’t really differentiate between writing a love poem or a poem about a blue heron, or a poem about a demonstration or a poem about a Jewish holiday. To me, it’s all one vision.”  This vision is one where individual voice is revealed.  This is evident in "Breaking Out."  Bill Moyers argues that Piercy's gift is evident when she "forges imaginative communities centered in day-to-day mature relationships and on the awareness that human capacity cannot be separated from specific individual circumstances."  The transformative moment in which Piercy breaks the ruler and breaks out into a world of "power gained" becomes central to the poem.

Marge Piercy's poem "Breaking Out" examines the moment in which a young girl pushes back against the oppressive and violent patriarchal values that dictate her upbringing.

The poem begins with an assertion of the speaker's "first political act," which she cites as the moment of staring into the open doors of one of the closets in her parents' house and deciding that she will not participate in the act of housework once she leaves home. She describes the doors as "leaning together like gossips" in the first stanza in order to evoke stereotypical imagery of the feminine--two housewives with nothing better to do than lean on each other and whisper trivial secrets. It is this kind of "feminine" energy which makes up the closet and contains the "mangle" of chores that the speaker is forced to assist with: the ironing mentioned in the second stanza and the vacuuming in the third.

Unlike the open, receiving feminine energy of the closet, these objects are given masculine traits. It is not just sheets and towels which the girl must iron, but her father's underwear--a symbol of her gender oppression and the submissiveness which she is forced to assume. The upright vacuum is described as a "stuffed sausage bag," which seems almost phallic in nature. Both of these items comment on the presence of male force within the household. They are strange, a bit sexual, and the speaker feels demeaned by them--a feeling which is deepened by her hatred for watching her mother scrub the floors of the house.

This act is significantly compared to the myth of Sisyphus--the deceitful kind of Ephyra who was punished by being eternally forced to roll a boulder up a hill and who serves as the modern emblem of a futile task--in the fourth stanza. The speaker is clear that a woman's work in the household never ends and that she wants no part of it. 

The speaker then turns her attention to the object that is most violently used to generate her oppression: the wooden yardstick with which her parents beat her until she screams. It is described as a stork in that it "delivers" her punishment in much the same way the traditional stork figure would deliver a baby to a doorstep. In the seventh stanza, the speaker comments again on the dominant presence of the male figure in her household: her father, who uses the stick "far longer and harder." However, despite this violence seeming gruesome, it actually provides grotesque motivation for the speaker to escape her circumstances and defy the patriarchal values that run her life. She views the bruises she receives as "a map that offered escape" and the veins and arteries as "the roads / I could travel to freedom." They are potent reminders of what she is currently facing and what she knows she must transcend. 

The speaker takes her fate into her own hands in the eighth stanza when she seizes the yardstick and smashes it "to kindling." Her disbelief at her own strength in the face of something that has caused her so much pain surprises her, and she cannot help but consider how something weaker than herself could do such damage. This is the moment in which she measures her pain and herself--and thus realizes her true ability to break out of the domestic cult within which she is trapped. 

As the speaker asserts in the final stanza, she will not become like Sisyphus (and thus will avoid the fate of her eternally scrubbing mother) by learning that some things in life must be broken. This is the mental freedom she has desired all along, even if it does not immediately generate a physical release from the realities of her harsh childhood. 

"Breaking out" moves back and forth between the thoughts of an empowered female, designated by "I," and a little girl who feels powerless, indicated by an "i." They are both the same person, and the poem shows how the scared and questioning little girl grows powerful in two ways, first, by rejecting the domestic life led by her housewife mother and second, by breaking the yardstick her parents used to beat her.

In the first four stanzas, the little girl questions the life of housework that she, as a female, is being raised to lead. She doesn't see any need for using the "mangle" to iron clothes and she is not interested in the "stuffed sausage bag" of the vacuum cleaner. She can't understand why her mother submits to such drudgery, but knows she will not follow in her mother's footsteps.

In school, when she reads about the Greek Sisyphus, who was sent to Hades and had to roll a rock up a hill, always to have it slip from his grasp and roll to the bottom when he was half way up, so that he had to start over and over, the girl connects this to her mother's life of housework:

it was her I
thought of, housewife scrubbing
on raw knees as the factory rained ash.

In the second part of the poem, the girl describes being beaten and how painful it is. Finally, she breaks the yardstick that is used to beat her, and is surprised at how easy it is to do so. Breaking the yardstick doesn't end the beatings, but it does give her a sense of power.

Piercy sums up the poem's meaning in the final stanza:

This is not a tale of innocence lost but power gained : I would not be Sisyphus,  there were things that I should learn to break.

The final stanza means she has gained power by deciding not to become a housewife ("Sisyphus") and by learning she can "break" what oppresses her, like the yardstick used to beat her. 

Marge Piercy's "Breaking Out" was was initially published in the Harbor Review in 1984. It reflects two themes or attitudes common in Piercy's work: feminism and social activism. As is also common in her work, the poem has autobiographical elements, reflecting Piercy's own upbringing in a working-class family during the Depression.

The poem is written in the first person in past tense and looks backward at an event that occurred when the narrator was eleven years old, an event that the narrator considers a turning point in her transformation from life as a passive and subordinate child to an independent adolescent. The narrator's self-assertion rejects her subordinate role as both child and female, identifying her own oppression by her parents with the way her mother appears oppressed by patriarchal society.

The poem is written in free verse, divided into stanzas of irregular length. The lines are of approximately equal length, some being end-stopped and some enjambed. The language is fairly simple, realistically embodying the voice and viewpoint of a young girl.

The poem begins with a description of a mangle (a device used for ironing) and a vacuum cleaner. For the narrator, these are both symbols of her mother's oppression and the oppression of women in general, a life she herself sees as empty and futile and compares to the task of Sisyphus, which she learned about in school. Reading is portrayed as an escape from and mode of resistance to the drudgery of housework.

Towards the middle of the poem, we learn that both the narrator's father and mother beat her with a wooden stick when she had been "judged truly wicked." She describes the beatings and her injuries from them.

The final part of the poem describes the day she asserts herself by taking the stick and breaking it. Although this did not mark an end to the beatings, it changed the way she thought about herself in relationship to her family and led her to make a resolution: 

I would not be Sisyphus, 
there were things that I should learn to break.