Diving into the Wreck

“Diving into the Wreck” is the title poem of Adrienne Rich’s 1973 National Book Award-winning collection. A 94-line, ten stanza free verse poem, the work encompasses Rich’s thematic concerns of radical feminism and art and examines how gender functions within the larger context of culture, literature, and oral tradition.

Rich’s mid-career poem came about during a period of intense change in her life. While her earlier poems had been more traditional in form and topic, over the course of the 1960s and 1970s she began experimenting with form and topic and began to embrace free verse and write from the perspective of a female speaker, a move that her earlier counterparts may have dismissed as merely personal. Both the political climate and movements like confessionalism, led by poets like Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, opened a door for Rich that allowed her to more freely explore new topics and ideas in her poetry. “Diving into the Wreck” was a culmination of this, advancing her feminist philosophy within the context of a tightly crafted poem.

The poem operates with a primary metaphor of the speaker as a diver who enters the ocean and explores the wreck of a sunken ship. Rich uses rich imagery and other poetic devices to argue against overly gendered historical expectations of women (and men) and uses the speaker to advance a new possibility for a more equitable future.

Poet Biography

Adrienne Rich was born in 1929 in Baltimore; her father was a pathologist at Johns Hopkins and her mother was a concert pianist. Encouraged throughout her childhood by her father, Rich excelled academically and exhibited a passion for literature and writing from an early age; she completed her first book of poetry at the age of six. She attended an all-girls high school before matriculating at Radcliffe College, where she continued to write poetry and study literature. In 1951, the year she graduated, W.H. Auden selected Rich’s first poetry collection, A Change of World as the winner of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets prize.

After college, Rich went to Oxford on a Guggenheim scholarship. While she was there she maintained a correspondence with Alfred Conrad, an economics professor she had recently met. When she returned to the United States in 1953, the two married, much to Rich’s father’s disappointment, who disapproved of Alfred, perhaps due to his somewhat scandalous first marriage to a dancer who was later institutionalized for mental health issues.

While Rich remembered Conrad with affection, she also noted a strain in their relationship from the beginning and later wrote extensively on the ways in which motherhood (she had three children before she turned thirty) had a profound impact on her life and her budding feminism. In her early marriage, the couple prioritized Conrad’s work, and Rich found herself exhausted by the everyday demands of keeping house and raising children. In the first decade of her marriage, she produced only one collection of poetry, The Diamond Cutters, which she later claimed to regret. After her third child, she had a tubal ligation procedure, ensuring that the third child would be her last.

The 1960s and 1970s marked a turning point for Rich’s writing and literary career. While her earlier work had been deliberate and formal, she began to depart from previous forms and increasingly drew on her personal life and experience as a woman. While Rich rejected the label of “confessional poet,” she nevertheless became involved in many of the same literary circles and formed relationships with contemporaries like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. When she published Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law in 1963, she encountered a more disparaging critical response, including from her father, despite feeling more convicted in her own skill and talent. 

Rich continued to examine new poetic sensibilities, embracing free verse and more experimental forms and examining a domestic voice. In 1970, she separated from her husband; several months later, he committed suicide, leaving her a widow. In the wake of his death, Rich mourned and continued to explore new ways of being, both in her life and in her writing. She explored romantic and sexual relationships with women, eventually partnering with writer Michelle Cliff in 1976, who would remain with her until her death.

Rich published her seminal collection Diving into the Wreck in 1973 during this period of intense change and newness, demonstrating her shift toward a more radical feminist stance. The collection earned her a National Book Award in 1974, which she accepted with her co-nominees, Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, on behalf of all women.

Over the next decades, Rich continued to publish poetry and essays and became increasingly involved in radical political and philosophical movements. She has earned a MacArthur Genius grant, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and many other awards, honors, and recognitions. She famously refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997, claiming, “I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration…[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage" (“Adrienne Rich.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets).

Rich died in March of 2012. She was 82 years old.

Poem Text

Rich, Adrienne. “Diving into the Wreck.” 1973. Poets.org.

Summary

“Diving into the Wreck” begins with the speaker describing her preparations to scuba dive down to a shipwreck. She has done several things to ready herself, including reading from a book of myths, loading her camera, and checking the sharpness of her knife. She dons her scuba suit, replete with “the body armor of black rubber / the absurd flippers / the grave and awkward mask” (Lines 5-7). The speaker points out that she is doing this alone; she does not have the supplies and supportive team that a male counterpart like Jacques Cousteau had in her position. 

In the second stanza the speaker describes a ladder hanging off the side of the boat, emphasizing that it is “always there” (Line 14), and claims that “We know what it is for, / we who have used it” (Lines 17-18), alluding to an insider knowledge and well-worn experience that she possesses. In the following stanza, she describes descending the ladder, rung by rung, into the water, and experience that is somewhat unnerving; she states that her flippers “cripple” her (Line 29), and she feels like an insect as she crawls down. Once again, she emphasizes her solitude, stating that no one is there to tell her where the ocean begins.

As she enters the water, her vision shifts through different colors until she feels that she is blacking out. At that point, though, her mask saves her, as it “pumps [her] blood with power” (Line 38). She feels uncertain in the ocean, noting that she must accustom herself and her body to moving within it.

As the speaker moves further into the ocean, she finds it difficult to remember her purpose, especially among the creatures that have always lived there, claiming that even her breathing is different in this ecosystem. She says that the purpose of this exploration is to see the wreck and “the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail (Lines 55-56), and she begins to shift her light across the sunken ship. She claims that she came for “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth” (Lines 62-63) and offers a lyrical description of what she sees.

In the eighth stanza, the speaker identifies herself in mythic terms as the mermaid and the merman, both male and female and begins to conflate descriptions of these figures with those of the wrecked ship and its elements. In the final stanza, she claims that “we” are the ones who “find our way / back to this scene” (Lines 89-90), before revisiting the opening images of the poem, describing again how she carries the knife, camera, and book of myths, noting this time that the book is one in which “our names do not appear” (Line 94).