Adrienne Rich
(b. 1929)
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Diving into the Wreck *
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First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on 5 the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his 10 assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there 15 hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise 20 it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me 25 the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, 30 I craw like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then 35 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 the sea is another story 40 the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget 45 what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs 50 and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. 55 I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent 60 than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring 65 toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion 70 among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circle silently 75 about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress 80 whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course 85 the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way 90 back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.
Editor´s Comments
Almost all poems use figurative language in some way. The body is a "fading mansion" in Shakespeare's sonnet, while in Blake a metaphor may be announced by a single word: "I wander through each charter'd street." But poets can also use what's known as an extended metaphor. They can explore all the possibilities of meaning or emotion a metaphor might contain, and they can even write entire poems which consists of a single extended metaphor. That's what Adrienne Rich does in "Diving into the Wreck."
One of the interesting consequences for the reader when a poem is built around a single extended metaphor is that while you're reading it, you can never step outside of the metaphor. That leaves a lot more room for interpretation -- or mis-interpretation, compared to poems where the metaphor is just one part of a structure that might limit its meaning through statements, or logical argument, or maybe some kind of dramatic situation. Metaphors are suggestive -- that's why they're powerful. It's also why they can be hard to control.
Rich does give us some signposts, though. We're told in the first line that the diver has read the book of myths, and at the end, deep under water, she's still got it, and a new detail is added: that it doesn't contain "our names." It's tempting to decide who that "our" might refer to, and then make an allegory out of the poem. For example, if the "our" refers to all women, then the poem is a powerful way of honoring generations of women who are unknown not because they never lived, but because their lives were never noticed. Or, yet again, the poem may be about just some women -- lesbians, for instance; or, maybe it's about another category entirely: Jews perhaps. The fact is, that a poem which is entirely metaphoric, like this one, invites us to imagine all of these possibilities, and much more.
Historical Considerations
"I am an instrument," wrote Adrienne Rich in her poem "Planetarium" (1968), "in the shape / of a woman trying to translate pulsations / into images for the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind." How she began to change herself into such an "instrument" is the subject of her famous autobiographical essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1972, 1976, 1978). Her life- first as "faculty wife" and mother, then as civil rights and antiwar activist, then as lesbian in the women's liberation movement, teacher, and lecturer- and her books- sixteen of poetry, four of prose- all demonstrate that, as the critic David Kalstone said, work, for her, "is a jagged present, always pitched toward the future and change." It is this commitment to change, as much as the example of her life, that has made her a crucial figure in contemporary feminist experience.
The Poet´s Life and Work
Critical Essays
- Margaret Atwood, "Review of Diving into the Wreck."
- Terence Des Pres, "Adrienne Rich, North America East."
- Judith McDaniel, "'Reconstituting the World': The Poetry and Vision of Adrienne Rich."
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