"Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich

Rich's poem "Diving into the Wreck" is brilliant in how it is so picturesque and realistic in description of underwater exploring through the eyes of the diver. It was easy to imagine a lone person stepping into diving gear then stepping rung to rung down into the dark abyss of the ocean. In the beginning of the poem, the narrator states that they do not have to do this like " Cousteau with his assiduous team/ aboard the sun-flooded schooner/ but here alone." The narrator only wants to explore the wreck and nothing more. Rich uses such detailed description of what the diver submerges under water to discover. A wreck of an old ship "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/ toward the sun/ the evidence of damage/ work by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty/ the ribs of the disaster/ curving their assertion/ among the tentative haunters." The reader can easily picture the hauntingly beautiful appearance of the ship lost to the sea. "We are, I am, you are/ by cowardice or courage/ the one who find our way/ back to this scene/ carrying a knife, a camera/ a book of myths/ in which/ our names do not appear." These last nine lines of the poem I rather enjoy because of how the narrator tells how they are able to "go back" to a scene in which a living person has not viewed in ages but is still known in the book of myths to have existed. It is a scene of mystery and abandon in which the narrator took courage to discover in the depths of the ocean. It indeed takes courage to explore a ship wreck but even more so to do it alone.