A Journey of Discovery-Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck
Upon studying the life and works of Adrienne Rich, one discovers that a lot of her literature envelope a desire to educate her readers. The poem "Diving into the Wreck" is no exception. Rich speaks and writes passionately about feminist freedoms and rights and she conveys these ideas to her readers through "Diving into the Wreck" by using the images of exploring an under water world, one not seen by many. She creates a mysterious, yet exhilarating journey to exploring feminism by taking the reader to a forgotten shipwreck. She also reaches the realm of many, including males with the image of the androgen. The speaker morphs into this aquatic being and then is male and female, ultimately suggesting that the underwater world of hidden feminist issues is not pertinent to just one sex or one race. In "Diving into the Wreck", Rich identifies many aspects of life including reality, memory, emotions, and journeys and in each aspect the truth of feminist issues is shinning upon the speaker with the presence of sunlight. In this way, Rich is urging the reader to identify these issues instead of turning a blind eye as they will always be lingering just as the sunlight always shines down onto us. The imag
es and ideas in Rich's poem "Diving into the Wreck" follow a speaker through a journey of self-discovery and are used to introduce issues of feminism and sexism and to explain how these issues affect the speaker in the poem. Along his or her journey of self-discovery, the speaker encounters the shipwreck that is memory, kept in tact by the depths of the sea. "Like memory, sea preserves traumas that can only be observed or inspected, never changed or revised" (Roger Gilbert). A person's memory is destroyed over time, "I came to see the damage that was done" (55), and replaced with new thoughts of experience, "the treasures that prevail" (56). Stanza 5 determines that the speaker finds it "easy to forget" (44) what she came to explore for because "so many who have always/ lived here" (47) sway their "crenellated fans" (48). It is easy to forget what you are trying to remember sometimes because other memories cloud your mind. The 'others' who have always been there are the speaker's older memories, represented by fish and other aquatic sea life, that cloud his or her mind and all come up at once when trying to remember or visit the wreck, and disturbs the settled atmosphere. This atmosphere of the aquatic environment causes the speaker to see, maneuver and breathe differently as the speaker says: "you breathe differently down here" (51). This parallels how a person also is in a different state of mind when they are reflective or tying to remember something and may literally 'breathe differently'. The word "besides", (50) which separates the memories (the aquatic life, lines 46-49) and the physical state of mind (breathing differently, line 51), suggests that the speaker is convincing or reassuring him or herself of something. The tone changes when the reader comes across this line: "and besides" (50) which gives this impression of a self-justification. The speaker is justifying the time taken to remember and reflect because it is a different world during a self-reflective journey and the time taken to discover one's self has value. This value comes as a way to push by the past and move on with the future "the stage of consciousness to which the poet must explore and salvage from in order to advance in spirit" (Carmel Mendelson, Phyllis and Bryfonski, Dedria, PAGE NUMBERS). Stanza 8 shows the speaker as a mermaid once underwater and having explored the wreck. The color black appears again, the mermaids "dark hair"(71)
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2790
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)
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