Diving Into The Wreck Poem Analysis

“Diving into the Wreck” is a poem that is an experience, rather than a poem about an experience. The diver has read a book of myths and decided that she must go on a journey alone to discover the past, whether it is her own past or everyone’s past. Adrienne Rich uses a book of myths, a ladder, and the ocean as symbols to illustrate the quest an androgynous narrator who ventures off to discover the truth.
The book of myths is the first and last image of “Diving into the Wreck”. It is given the most mysterious image in the poem due to it being the call to action for the main character, the diver, to begin their journey. The poem starts off by stating that after the diver has read a book of myths, she starts to prepare a camera, a knife, a scuba suit and a pair of flippers for a dive. At this moment in the poem, it is unclear to the readers why the diver has been inspired by the book. However, as we reach the sixth stanza we learn that the diver must have found out about a shipwreck from this book of myths and has decided to determine whether the myth is true or not. At the end of the poem, the book of myths is brought up as if it had a …show more content…
By the end of quote above, the diver has accepted that the ocean is in control of her movements and that she is powerless to fight it. In the quote, “we are the half-destroyed instruments / that once held to a course / the water-eaten log / the fouled compass” The ocean is portrayed as an animal, one that chews and chomps the human instruments until they are reduced to nothing but bare bones. The ocean has destroyed the only way this ship had of navigating where it was going and where it had been. The author of the poem portrays the ocean as a destructive and inescapable force that the diver must face to accomplish the