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Diving Into The Wreck

Decent Essays

The theme in Diving into the wreck which I choose is Exploration. Exploration is the activity that takes place in this poem. Whatever else the speaker is doing or feeling or saying, she is diving down into the ocean to explore. We are used to this idea of exploring a shipwreck. Whether it's videos of the sunken Titanic or stories about diving for pirate gold, we know about people in wet suits looking at old ships. What this poem suggests, though, is that exploration might not just refer to looking at a ship. There might be other kinds of emotional, internal exploration going on here. The diver in "Diving into the Wreck" has an amazing, maybe even transcendental, experience underwater. Everything about the ocean world is fascinating, new, and intense. We aren't merely looking at nature in this poem, we are fully plunged into it. This poem is about exploring and changing and feeling, …show more content…

Then we enter the water, a whole new world, with new rules. Petty soon, we don't even know who our speaker is. Is our speaker a man or a woman? Is it even human? How do we deal with changes in our lives? When things change, when our environment shifts, do we become different people? These are tough questions, but important ones too, and Rich is partly using this poem to sort them out. This theme flashes by, but we think it's an important flash. Toward the end of "Diving into the Wreck," the speaker refers to herself or himself as a man and a woman. We often don't know the gender of the speaker of a poem. It's more unusual, though, for a poet to come out and directly confront us with that issue. This becomes one of the big turning points of the poem. Even though it's a little moment, it involves a lot of the other themes in the poem. It's certainly a big transformation, and it forces us to rethink the moments that came before

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