Blog #5: Diving into the Wreck

I chose to write this blog about Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" on pages 1386-1388. I found this poem really confusing and intriguing at the same time. I specifically want to discuss the part that really intrigued me, lines 62 through 77. 

Starting on line 62, where Rich writes "the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth" (Rich 1387). Rich wants to point out that there's a lot more to her journey than a shipwreck. To others like Jacques Cousteau, they dive to discover something beautiful and unique; Rich has discovered that there's nothing beautiful and unique about a shipwreck. Looking at the wreck is just sad. The "drowned face always staring/toward the sun" (1387) Rich describes turns out to be one of those mermaids you see on old ships. Everything about this wreck is depressing to look at, but it tells a story. Which is why at the end of her poem, Rich writes in the last stanza that we all have to write our own stories; otherwise we'll be lost like the "half-destroyed instruments" (1388). 

Another part that got my attention was the line that says "And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair/streams black, the merman in his armored body...I am she: I am he" (1387). These lines intrigued me because one, I love mermaids, and two because she writes them without boundaries between the two sexes. The use of "we" signifies unity and given that Rich participated in the Second Wave of Feminism, it makes sense. I'm not saying that the whole poem revolves around Feminism, but this part definitely does.