My interpretation of "Diving into the Wreck"

In the poem “Diving into the Wreck” written by Adrienne Rich, there are a number of images that caught my attention. The images that I noticed were the “wreck”, the “dive”, equipment such as a ladder, boots, camera, mask, lamp, and knife, and mermaids and mermen. By the third time I read the poem, I realized that the narrator was not talking about an underwater adventure but rather describing the events that occur during a war/battle. With the idea of the poem being about war, the “diver” becomes a soldier, the “wreck” is the disaster that has come upon the many people that are influenced by the war, and the “sea/ocean” is the land where the war is taking place.

In the first stanza, the narrator is suiting up for what ever task is at hand by getting ready for the dive (“loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber . . . ). However, the narrator is not suiting up with other people as a team; the narrator is suiting up for his/her own personal war/battle. A ladder is introduced to the reader as a way for the diver to enter the ocean. The ladder works as a gateway into unknown territory as a diver and into unknown land of another country during war as a soldier. The narrator describes colors of blue, green, and black. The colors represent the change in the diver’s surroundings. The blue color is from the sky; green from the ground; and the black is from “blacking out” (36). Such colors as the ones that are used paint a portrait to what the diver/soldier may see in their surroundings. In stanza five and six, the “diver” has forgotten the reason for his/her existence in the unknown territory. The lines 53-54 state “The words are purposes. The words are maps”. The knowledge that the narrator obtained about the adventure of the “wreck” paved the reasons for him/her being there. The “dive” represents the journey to explore one’s life purpose and reason for existence.

The volta appears in stanza seven because this is the turning point where the diver notices the death of the “mermaids and mermen”. Since the ocean represents where the war is taking place, the “mermaids and mermen” are the soldiers that risked their lives for the fight of such battle. The narrator recognizes the equality of women and men in the duty of war, which appears in lines 72-73. In lines 82-86, the narrator says, “we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course, the water-eaten log, and the fouled compass”. This part of the stanza creates an image in the reader’s mind of soldiers lying dead on the land they fought upon. The “fouled compass” and “the water-eaten log” symbolize the bullets that took the soldiers’ lives. As I read stanza ten, I quickly thought of a journalist or a historian going back to the battle grounds to tell the story of the battle. The person that “finds[s] our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera, and a book of myths” does not mention the names of the people that lost their lives. The dead are seen as invisible ghosts within the “wreck” of the ocean. The journey a person experiences through his/her lifetime shapes the way they react and live their life.

Rich, Adrienne. “Diving into the Wreck” The Norton Introduction To Literature. Ed. Peter Simon. New York: W. W. Norton & Company , 2005.
Vann, William. EduPic Graphical Resource. 2006. 30 Sep. 2008 .

Link for the diver image:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=diver&gbv=2

Link for the ship wreck image:

http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&q=underwater+ship+wreck