Diving into the Wreck Lyrics
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
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
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
About
The title of this famous Adrienne Rich poem suggests going into the past – looking down upon and becoming immersed in the remains of a disaster – and perhaps journeying into one’s personal history as well. “Diving” suggests that the wreckage takes effort to get to: it belongs, in a sense, to another world.
“Diving into the Wreck” is the title piece of a poetry collection for which Rich received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. She accepted the award alongside fellow female nominees Alice Walker and Audrey Lorde “…on behalf of all women.”
For more information on the National Book Awards, and Rich’s acceptance speech, see here.
For more critical responses to this poem, see the Modern American Poetry site, run by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
- 4.Incipience
- 7.From the Prison House (Missing Lyrics)
- 8.The Stranger
- 9.Song
- 10.Dialogue
- 11.Diving into the Wreck
- 13.Merced (Missing Lyrics)
- 14.A Primary Ground (Missing Lyrics)
- 15.Translations
- 18.Rape
- 21.For a Sister (Missing Lyrics)
- 22.For the Dead
- 23.From a Survivor
- 24.August
- 25.Meditations for a Savage Child (Missing Lyrics)