Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Adrienne Cecile Rich's "Midnight Salvage: 2" presents an unsettling commentary on academia, and perhaps institutional settings more broadly, that highlights the tension between individual thought and systemic rigidity. This poem reads like a resignation letter to a long career in academia, and by extension, an indictment of a system that values orthodoxy over true intellectual exploration. At its core, this poem grapples with the internal discord felt by someone who must navigate a space that seems to be both a sanctuary for intellectual freedom and a theater of imposed conformism.

The poem starts with a candid statement about the speaker's "conditions of hiring," which seem to allow them to "profess or declare anything at all." However, this freedom is subverted by the following line: "since in that place nothing would change." The autonomy to speak one's mind is revealed to be an illusion-any declarations made are inconsequential, rendering intellectual freedom meaningless. The lines "So many fountains, such guitars at sunset" may reflect the aesthetic distractions that often characterize academic or intellectual spaces. These are beautiful distractions, yet distractions nonetheless, preventing meaningful change.

Rich portrays an academic space filled with symbols of intellectualism and culture-"the Spanish steps, Keats' death mask and the English cemetery" and "Gramschi's fast-fading eyes." These symbols are "all so under control and so eternal / in burnished frames," indicating a stifling sense of established thinking. Everything is in its designated place, including ideologies and schools of thought, suggesting that intellectualism has been reduced to mere decoration, devoid of the potential for instigating change.

Even more striking is the reference to the "office of the marxist-on-sabbatical," as it points to the superficial way revolutionary thoughts are often dealt with in academia. The ideologies of change are pinned to walls like aesthetic choices, "thumbtacked on one wall," indicative of a space that pays lip service to revolutionary thought but remains fundamentally unchanged.

The speaker has "memories / and death masks of my own," stating their own experiences and philosophies that have been molded outside the framework of academic orthodoxy. The speaker can "not any more / peruse young faces already straining for / the production of slender testaments / to swift reading and current thinking." This captures the essence of academia as a factory for producing certain kinds of thoughts and thinkers, a production line of intellectual conformity where students are "already straining for" pre-approved wisdom.

The poem ends on a note of refusal: "Could not play by the rules / in that palmy place." The speaker refuses to "stand at lectern professing / anything at all / in their hire." The last two lines reveal the poem's underlying tension. This is not just a critique of a specific place but a searing commentary on the commodification of thought and teaching-highlighting the bind of being "in their hire," which inevitably comes with strings attached.

Rich's "Midnight Salvage: 2" thus examines how even the halls thought to be temples of free thought can become cages, their walls adorned with the fading prints of revolutionary ideas that have been neutered, stripped of their capacity to enact real change. It's a poignant reflection on the disillusionment one might feel when a place that should nurture intellectual freedom instead suffocates it.

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