Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

The line lands with the cool efficiency of someone who knows exactly where the social tripwires are buried. Hacker begins by making it sound almost bureaucratic: "Clearly" suggests a rule so self-evident it hardly needs defending. That faux-neutral tone is the tell. She is not innocently describing romance; she is pointing at how institutions manufacture boundaries, then pretend those boundaries are purely moral rather than structural.

The pivot is the phrase "once the student is no longer a student". It's a legalistic loophole masquerading as common sense. In academic life, "student" is less a person than a status that triggers a whole apparatus of power: grading, mentorship, gatekeeping, recommendation letters, future careers. The quote's subtext is that desire and intimacy don't magically become cleaner when a registrar updates a file. What changes is exposure. The risk shifts from harm to reputation; from coercion to plausible deniability.

"Possibilities...enlarged" is doing heavy lifting, too. Enlarged for whom? The passive construction conveniently hides the agent, a sly way of dramatizing asymmetry. It implies an adult world where relationships are framed as opportunities, even when they might be aftershocks of earlier influence. Hacker, a poet with a long record of writing about eros, intellect, and social constraint, is keenly attuned to how language sanitizes ethically loaded situations. The line reads like an extracted justification - something someone says to themselves (or to a committee) to translate an imbalance into inevitability.

It works because it doesn't argue; it exposes the argument's rhetoric. The "clear" thing is precisely what's not clear.