puts on her rubber diving outfit, including mask
and flippers. Then she comments that unlike Jac-
ques Cousteau, the famous twentieth-century
French marine explorer, she has no team of help-
ers to assist her; she is going to dive alone. There
is a ladder hanging from the side of the schooner,
and the speaker descends. As she begins her
descent she is very conscious of the daylight and
the air, the normal, familiar environment in
which humans live. Her flippers make her feel
uncomfortable as she descends the ladder with
difficulty, conscious of the fact that she is alone,
with no one to guide her.
Stanzas 4–6
She reaches the water and descends into it, con-
scious of how her visual environment has
changed from the blue of the sky to the green
of the water, which quickly turns to black. She is
grateful for her mask and now has to learn how
to move underwater, which is much different
from moving about on land and requires a new
set of skills. As she surveys the scene underwater,
observing the teeming marine life, she realizes
that she must focus her mind on the purpose of
her dive and not forget it. The speaker reminds
herself that she has come to explore the remains
of a sunken ship. She wants to examine the
extent of the damage the wreck has suffered
and also to find what valuables remain.
Stanzas 7–10
The speaker explains that what she really wants
is to find out the true condition of the ship, which
may not be the same as what she has read or
heard about it. The conventional wisdom about
the ship may only be a myth. Just before she
arrives at the wreck, she pictures to herself the
effigy of a female face that was carved on the
prow of the old sailing ship, which always looked
upward, and she thinks of the damage the wreck
has undergone in all the years it has spent under-
water, with just a skeleton of its form remaining.
She finally arrives at the wreck in stanza 8 and
imagines herself as a mermaid that can take both
male and female form. In this kind of imagina-
tive androgynous form she swims all around the
wreck and enters its hold. She refers again to the
female face on the prow and then appears to find
the ship’s cargo of precious metals inside rotting
barrels. She also discovers the messy, worn-away
remnants of other parts of the ship’s equipment,
including its log and compass. The poem ends
with an affirmation of the importance of making
such a journey, whatever the motivation for
undertaking it. The allusion here is clearly to
the journey as one of inner exploration in search
of the truth, the real truth as opposed to what
others may have said.Themes
The Search for Truth
Although the poem can be read at the literal level,
it is really about the exploration of the areas of
the speaker’s mind, heart, and experience of life
that have, for whatever reason, not been exam-
ined before. It relates a journey from the con-
scious, surface levels of the mind, the everyday
reality of life, to the deeper subconscious levels
that have been ignored, repressed, or distorted by
self and others. The schooner on which the poet
stands is the metaphoric equivalent of the every-
day world: it exists in the daylight and the sun-
light. The water into which the poet dives
represents the deeper levels of the mind, and the
ship discovered there represents the parts of the
psyche that have not been consciously acknowl-
edged. The poet is determined to discover the
truth about these murky, unexplored regions,
which is why she takes with her a knife (to dissect
what she finds and to distinguish truth from false-
hood) and a camera, which will record with abso-
lute fidelity and without distortion what is truly
present. There will be no convenient distortions
to make life more superficially comfortable: the
truth must be faced.
That this is a difficult undertaking is made
abundantly clear, because the speaker has to donMEDIA
ADAPTATIONS Adrienne Rich Reading at Stanfordwas pro-
duced by the Stanford Program for Record-
ings in Sound in 1973. Rich reads fourteen
of her poems on the recording, including
‘‘Diving into the Wreck.’’Diving into the Wreck