Theme Of Diving Into The Wreck

In a beautifully descriptive poem titled “Diving into the Wreck”, author Adrienne Rich seems to be depicting a quest the narrator is on, to delve deep into the sea and explore a wreckage beneath the waves. The poem focuses more so on the preparation and process of the dive rather than of the search of the wreckage itself, which plays an interesting factor in the poem. But, as the narrator dives into the water, the reader is taken into a deeper journey along with them. Diving under the surface of the poem, and looking further into the meaning, there is a central theme of women who have been oppressed for hundreds of years struggling for their rights in a society that is mainly dominated by males. The poem is much more than just an adventurous

The three main metaphors in the specific in the passage above would be considered the wreck, the myth, and the drowned face. If you take into consideration that Rich was one of the greatest feminine writers in the 1970’s, you can begin to understand how the wreck is more than just a sunken ship, how the myth is more than just a book, and how the drowned face is more than just one person submerged in water. The wreck is a metaphor for everything that has been suppressed and devalued in women in history, and even at the time the poem was written. Rich uses the wreck to symbolize the oppression of women in a patriarchal society, and all the value that women could have added to society that has been lost and “left to rot” by the oppression of the female species, casting them out as ‘the others’ (line 82). The use of this metaphor has a great deal of impact. I believe Rich is trying to show that oppressing women has caused a great loss of knowledge, power, and riches that could’ve contributed to society in the same way that the loss of a great ship with loads of treasure and precious cargo would have been a loss to society as well. When Rich writes, “the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck”, she is saying the narrator was searching to represent the women who have been oppressed. She is fighting for the female species, and wasn’t interested in the false histories written

The structure of the poem is that of a free verse. In the 1970s, free verse was considered a rebellion against traditional poetry, you could say it was out of the norm. The use of this poem has a fascinating underlying meaning. Rich may have used this form for an explicit reason, and that is to rebel against the patriarchal society that she, and all women, are trapped in. Rich is rebelling against not only traditional poets and authors of her time, but of the society that she is a part of, and against the group of ‘others’ that she and many women have been placed in. Along with the free verse form, she has an interesting choice of sentence structure throughout the poem. If you refer to the passage above, there is not a single period, but the passage (and the rest of the stanza) are one entire sentence instead, chopped into lines. This use of enjambment makes the reader read the passage in a hastier fashion, and in some cases in an awkward, and chopped way. There is a purpose behind this, and I believe that the reader is meant to read this passage and feel a sense of urgency to get through it. That sense of urgency can be reflected in the urgency that women’s rights should be fought for. Society should feel that the inequality in the social world is not right, and that equality should be sought after with persistence and hastiness. In