Adrienne Rich was an American poet, essayist, and feminist. She was called one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century, by one of her many admirers Cary Nelson, in the Anthology of Modern American Poetry. She was born into an era in which women were looked down upon, and shined a light on the oppression of women. The poem that she did this with is a 2.5 page poem called Diving Into the Wreck. In he poem Diving Into the Wreck, the author uses the destruction to show the wreck in people’s lives after they have encountered sexism.
In the first three stanzas it almost sounds as though the diver is preparing for battle, in the ocean, “I put onThe body armor of black rubber”(4,5) But in the first and second lines when she says “First having the book of myths And loaded the camera,” (1,2), shows that she knows what she is doing, and has read the book of myths, and is searching for something. “I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun flooded schooner but here alone”(8-12). By stating this she is saying that she has to do this, but she has to go alone. By stating that Cousteau’s team is assiduous, she almost sounds jealous of Cousteau.
In the second stanza she talks about a ladder, “There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently Close to the side of schooner. We know what it is for we who have used it.” This ladder must be what she is using to descend into the ocean. The ladder, also looks innocent, but has the threat of the unknown lying beneath it. She is not the only one to have used the ladder, she also might have used the ladder before, however, she might not have succeeded. “Otherwise It is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment.” She’s saying that if you don’t know how to use the ladder, it isn’t worth anything, it is useless. She is also using another word (maritime) to show you just how useless it is. In the first three stanzas she’s preparing herself, mentally, and physically. However after the first three stanzas the tone changes from preparation, to an apprehensive confrontation, of what the author is preparing for.
The next 2 stanzas are about the beginning of this woman’s journey into the dark, and murky ocean. “I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air.”(26-30) The oxygen that she is talking about must be her mask. And of course rung after rung must be the ladder. Since all she has is the ladder to help her go down, this must be a very difficult descent, because she doesn’t have anything weighing her down. The author also gives the ladder some personification by saying that it is “Hanging innocently” (18) “I go down. My flippers cripple me. crawl like an insect down the ladder And there is no one To tell me when the ocean will begin.”(30-36) This only goes to show how difficult this is for her. The reader can only imagine how difficult it is to push herself down that ladder, instead of floating back up to the top; because of the similie by comparing herself insect.
So the diver has to have that much more determination. The next stanza is the description for just after the diver’s entrance into the ocean. “First the air is blue and then It is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power” (37-41) So, as the diver is going into the water it at first is easy, and then it gets more difficult, and finally she passes out. However her mask is so powerful, it just keeps giving oxygen to her. The mask is an analogy to her motivation to find whatever she is looking for. “the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element”(41-46) Here the author is reiterating how difficult the journey is, which in turn shows how much she wants the end result.
In the next three stanzas, the end result is exactly what the diver is talking about. “And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenelated fans between the reefs”(47-52) It sounds as though because it is so difficult, the diver forgets what she was doing down there in the first place. Then in the next stanza she remembers, “I came to explore the wreck.”(55). So she’s diving down to explore the wreck. The wreck of what, is the question. Possibly the wreck she is exploring has something to do with the book of myths she mentioned earlier. The book of myths is probably a book about the wreck. And so the fact that she is down there, even though she has read the book of myths, means that she wants to see for herself what has happened, it is not enough for her to have someone tell her what happened, no she has to know for herself. “I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail” (58-59)
The diver knows that there will be destruction, but she also believes that there will be beauty left in the ashes, so to speak. “I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed” (59-63) The diver is looking for proof, something she can show people, whether she is wrong or right at least she will no exactly what happened, and then she won’t need the book of myths anymore. “the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth”(64-66) So now the diver is bluntly saying what he is there for.
She is there for the wreck; she wants to know exactly what happened, she doesn’t want some story that a bunch of people came up with, that might or might not be true. “the drowned face always staring toward the sun”(67-68) The face of this wreck that this diver is going down to look for is just staring up at the sun, from the bottom of the ocean. And the way this is phrased in the poem almost sounds like a dead person would be if they were lying on the ocean floor. “the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty”(69,70) If this poem were merely talking about a ship the evidence of damage would mean, bullet holes, bits that have been blown away, and some debris lying around the ship; however since she is not talking about a ship in this poem the reader knows she must be talking about something else. Instead she is talking about all of the scars of the people that have suffered from sexism; whether that be about men or women.
And then the second line out of those two, shows that those wounds have been there for a long time, and the salt and sway has started to wear them away. “the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters” The ribs, the gut of the disaster, just curving up, simply lying there, curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. What are the haunters afraid of? Why are they tentative? In this poem the reader can only see one definitive answer, the haunters are tentative of what put them there.
In the last three stanzas the poem takes a much more creative turn. “This is the place And I am here, The mermaid whose dark hair Streams back, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he”(74-80) In this section the author is using a lot of metaphor and imagery. Since we know that there is no such thing as mermaids, we know that the author must have been referring to something else here. The author was most likely referring to, these to species coming together, and the fact that it is not just mermaid that wants answers the merman want answers to.
“Whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo leis obscurely inside barrels half wedged left to rot” (81-85) Now the author is saying that she is the one with the drowned face, because before the author was saying that she was the one who was both the merman and the mermaid. The author is also saying that whoever has the drowned face, that they must also come from some sort of wealth since they have silver, copper, and vermeil. In the poem the author also says that the cargo “leis obscurely inside the barrels half-wedged and left to rot” However, the author does not say lain or lay she says leis, leis are a wreath made out of flowers commonly given to guests on an island of some kind. So, since we know that leis, means something entirely different, we can now understand what the author is trying to say in this poem.
There are leis of silver copper and vermeil, almost given to the guest of the wreck, like some kind of an offering, to maybe soften the blow a little bit, of ho horrible the wreck actually is. “we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water eaten log the fouled compass” (86-89) In this I think that the author is saying that, after the wreck everyone is so worn out, and broken down, that they become unusable they become the half-destroyed instruments. “We are, I am, You are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.”(90- 97) The author is telling the reader, that they have gone and done the research, and they know what actually happened but for some reason there name still does not appear in the book. This is because what is chosen to be put in the book, and what is chosen for everyone to know is decided by that of a few, and the people who do the work themselves, and find the actual answers are not apart of that few.
In this poem Diving Into the Wreck the author uses a bunch of different symbols, like the knife, the book, the camera, the ladder, the ocean, the wreck, the mermaid merman, and the compass and the log. At the end of the poem and the beginning it talks about the knife, the camera, and the book in a group of three, the camera that traps memories, the book that holds nothing but lies, and the knife that kills; they are necessary for the dive, but can be very harmful if not used correctly. The next symbol is the ladder, that gets almost 20 lines, the ladder is a way down, but it is an obstacle, because she is already so weighed down, the author shows this by using a simile comparing the diver to an insect. Another symbol in this poem is the ocean, the author shows the ocean, as a kind of animal. It gnaws and chews and slowly devours until all of the human things have disintegrated.
It has a slow inescapable force, that makes it a terrifying force to be reckoned with. Another heavily used symbol in the poem is the wreck. The wreck is used as a metaphor for human suffering. In a way this wreck represents the remains of any disaster that has changed their lives, and in this poem the particular disaster is sexism. The next big symbol is the mer-person that she becomes. This is the diver’s final transformation. This transformation show the unity between the ocean and a human, because the torso up is human, and the torso down is fish. This transformation also shows that the diver is identifies with both sexes, since she is both mermaid, and merman. All of these symbols together, show the reader how sexism has destroyed, and will continue to destroy people’s lives.
