Diving into the Wreck Essay Questions

The speaker dives into a shipwreck, which is clearly a metaphor for looking at the ruins of history. Why does Rich choose an underwater setting for this poem (for example, as compared to the ruins of a city, or the aftermath of a car crash)?

The underwater ruins of “Diving into the Wreck” require the speaker to go into a different world: one where she moves differently, breathes differently, and thinks differently. If the shipwreck in this poem is a metaphor for the catastrophes of history, the poem also asks us to consider when and where we must look at this catastrophe. It provides an answer: in poetry itself. The ocean can be understood as a metaphor for the imaginative world of art; it is precisely in and through art and poetry that one must confront the ills of history.

Explain the speaker’s switch from “I” to “we” in stanza seven, and especially her identification with the mermaid and merman.

The speaker in this poem begins her quest alone, stating that she does not have a “team.” However, when she encounters the carved figure of a mermaid and merman, she identifies with both, and begins to use the pronoun “we.” This can be viewed as a call to collective action. As Rich is often read as a feminist poet, it may be surprising that she also includes a merman in this “we.” Here, Rich might seem to suggest that the struggle for the truth, as well as the liberation of the oppressed, is a collective struggle that crosses and even erases the lines of gender.