Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

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Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

Introduction and Main Theme

Diving into the Wreck is Adrienne Rich’s most celebrated poem. It is unanimously called epic of our modern times. The poet gives a description of the sea and her dive into the sea, the various things observed and particular experiences underwent are all beautifully narrated and described. The poem is also adventurous because it I based on the search for a wreck.

Here Diving into the Wreck is not a simple adventure story, but Rich has a very serious account to relate. On the onset, it is a story of a diver going into the water to observe a wreck, but as the seawater is deep and mysterious so are the meanings of the poem. Basically the poem is the struggle for women rights in the male-dominated society. The poem is representative of not only Rich’s ideals, but also the changing conditions of American at the time when the poem was written.
Rich becomes androgyny[1] and wants to observe the damage that was done to the female race and the treasures that prevail in their rights. Her struggle for the voice of rights is single-handed.

[1]. Androgyny: medical term that shows characteristics of both sexes – male and female. Rich becomes Androgynous: again a medical term relating to or exhibiting both female and male sex organs but with a predominantly female appearance.

A Critique of Diving into the Wreck

Introduction

Wrecked ship. Ruins of a wrecked ship at the bottom of the sea are explored in “Diving into the Wreck,” the title poem of the collection. Although it is not named, the Atlantic Ocean is probably the sea that houses the wreck that the speaker of the poem explores. The wreck and the sea are not named because they must be inclusive, not exclusive. The primary symbol of the poem, representing unrecovered female history, seeks to identify with all its readers, as the final stanza reinforces:
We are, I am, you are
a book of myths in which
our names do not appear

The image of the sea is a metaphor of life as sea is full of wreckages; the world too is full of ruins. One glance around will bring back countless pictures of destruction. Diving into the Wreck provides the angle of perception about the wreck from both the male and the female side. It is androgyny that investigates the wreck, not female or male alone. The poem is hailed as an epic of the modern times. It statement is fully justified by the technical merits of the poem and the subject matter.

Development of Thought

Quest for Fact or Myth

According to Margaret Atwood, the wreck she is diving into, in the very strong title poem, is the wreck of obsolete myths, particularly myths about men and women. She is journeying to something that is already in the past, in order to discover for herself the reality behind the myth,
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth.”

What she finds is part treasure and part corpse, and she also finds that she herself is part of it, a “half-destroyed instrument.” As explorer she is detached; she carries a knife to cut her way in, cut structures apart; a camera to record; and the book of myths itself, a book which has hitherto had no place for explorers like herself.
This quest--the quest for something beyond myths, for the truths about men and women, about the “I” and the “You,” the He and the She, or more generally (in the references to wars and persecutions of various kinds) about the powerless and the powerful--is presented throughout the book through a sharp, clear style and through metaphors which become their own myths. At their most successful the poems move like dreams, simultaneously revealing and alluding, disguising and concealing. The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.

Depth of the Poem

According to Nancy Milford, In Diving into the Wreck she enters more deeply than ever before into female fantasy; and these are primal waters, life-giving and secretive in the special sense of not being wholly revealed. The female element. A diver may dive to plunder or to explore.
First having read the book of myths,
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.
Alone and crippled by her equipment, she is descending, she is
having to do this,
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin
And even though the mask of the diver is powerful the point of the dive is not the exercise of power in self-defense.
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element
She came “to explore the wreck.” And what is the wreckage; is it of marriage, or of sex, or of the selfhood within each? Is it the female body, her own?
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
Moving in deeply private images, circling darkly and richly into the very sources of her poetry, she is, as she says, “coming-home to. . .sex, sexuality, sexual wounds, sexual identity, sexual politics”:
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
Dreaming of the person within the poem: she walking toward me, naked, swaying, bending down, her dark long hair falling forward of its own weight like heavy cloth shielding my face and her own, her full breasts brushing my cheek, moving toward my mouth. The dream is the invention of the dreamer, and the content of the dream moves in symbols of sustenance and of comfort. The hands of that diving woman become our own hands, reaching out, touching, holding; not in sex but in deliverance. That is the potency of her poetry: it infuses dreams, it makes possible connections between people in the face of what seems to be irrevocable separateness, it forges an alliance between the poet and the reader. The power of her woman’s voice crying out, I am: surviving, sustaining, continuing, and making whole
we move together like underwater plants
The meaning of Wreck
Deborah Pope in finding the meaning of the wreck states, the wreck represents the battered hulk of the sexual definitions of the past, which Rich, as an underwater explorer, must search for evidence of what can be salvaged. Only those who have managed to survive the wreck--women isolated from any meaningful participation or voice in forces that led to the disaster--are in a position to write its epitaph and their own names in new books.
Rich’s Approach to the Wreck
"Diving into the Wreck" presents a less privatized, more mythologized version of the theme in "Waking in the Dark." Rich again creates a setting that merges the ruinous state of modern civilization with the damaged sexuality of the self. The poet begins the exploration alone, but she suggests that others have risked such journeys toward clarification. In a passage that Rich and most readers now find problematic, the solitary explorer modulates into an androgyne as she

approaches the wreck:
the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
... I am she: I am he....

Speaking, feeling, and seeing for both sexes, the poet wants to witness "the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth." Margaret Atwood notes that the wreck is "beyond salvation though not beyond understanding" (239), but the poem actually offers very little analysis of the wreck and quite a bit of explanation of how the wreck is approached, how the inquiry is carried out, and how the explorer understands the mission and her/himself. Other than describing the wreck of the self and of culture as the drowned face" and

the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log / the fouled compass,

The poem focuses on the process and attitude of the explorer. Even the motive is vague and not necessarily pure:
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Diving into the Wreck offers a metaphor for the crisis and necessity that could only be called a detached "it" in "Trying to Talk with a Man": "Coming out here we are up against it" (my emphasis). Yet as Cary Nelson has noted, "Diving into the Wreck" is hardly a concrete or thoroughly grounded poem since the androgyny it supplies oversimplifies sexuality and is itself a myth (156).
For Nelson, the poem "demonstrates that one can suppress difficult feelings by mythologizing them" in "stylized and abstract" ways (156); however, the poem's attention to the process of exploring the wreck and not to the analysis of the wreck is significant for both Rich's feminist theory and her poetic practice. The poem has cleared ground, and unlike "When We Dead Awaken," it stops before it reconstructs anything, satisfied with creating a new signifying space rather than overly desperate to fill it. In fact, the ending returns us to the beginning of the poem and prepares for another exploration by again mentioning the knife, the camera, and the book. As Werner says, the poem continually makes ready "for the descent which we are, then and now and perpetually, just beginning" (175). In its mythologized, abstract way, "Diving into the Wreck" conveys the dialectic between the epic feminist vision and the lyric feminist vision, as the diver and the wreck of culture coincide in the image of the "drowned face." While the modulation of the lyric "I" into the androgynous "we" presents problems, the strategy allows Rich to avoid the potential egotism of realistic self-dramatization and to expose the myth that the absence of "our names" signifies we are somehow unafflicted by the reductive sexual ideologies that prevail. Like many others in the volume, this poem raises the question of origin, of "where the split began" ("Waking in the Dark"): the poem privileges neither an external nor an internal site as the source of bifurcation, and it avoids hypostatizing a lost unity. Even the androgyny of the diver suggests not an original unity but the common bond of incompleteness, loss, and disrepair shared by all selves.

Past and Present

The better poems of Adrienne Rich always exact a certain price from anyone willing to participate in their vision. This is also true in the case of Diving into the Wreck. The kind of political awareness she advocates may cost a loss of personal freedom. The voyage into new territory may require us to adopt a generalized, mythic identity. The reader who accepts her vision uncritically has probably repressed the real anxieties accompanying self- recognition and personal change. The enthusiasm for her efforts to create a myth of androgynous sexuality is a typical case. To applaud the androgynous psyche or to announce this as its historical moment is easier than actually living out its consequences: “I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair / streams back, the merman in his armored body ... I am she: I am he.” We all have more varied sexual impulses than we can act on, but will Rich’s romanticized androgynous figure, “whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes,” help bring them any closer to realization? While that is not a criterion one would ordinarily apply to all poetry, it is relevant in Rich’s case. Unlike Roethke, she cannot take pleasure in the powerlessness of poetic solutions to social and historical conflicts. Her poetry continually testifies to her need to work out possible modes of human existence verbally, to achieve imaginatively what cannot yet be achieved in actual relationships. Moreover, she hopes that poetry can transform human interaction. Yet perhaps that is not, after all, the point, at least in poems like “Diving into the Wreck,” despite its call for “the thing itself and not the myth.” For what we have here is the myth, as Rich herself has now implicitly acknowledged: “There are words I cannot choose again: humanism androgyny”. “Such words,” she goes on to say, “have no shame in them.” They do not embody the history of anguish, repression, and self-control that precedes them. “Their glint is too shallow”; they do not describe either the past or the life of the present. As Rich has recently written of bisexuality, “Such a notion blurs and sentimentalizes the actualities within which women have experienced sexuality; it is the old liberal leap across the tasks and struggles of here and now.” Indeed “Diving into the Wreck” demonstrates that one can suppress difficult feelings by mythologizing them. It may be that both Rich and her readers are relieved to have their fear and their desire conjoined in symbols so stylized and abstract.

Conclusion

Words are purposes and maps. They are intentions we have toward each other, whether we are aware of those intentions or not; they are ways toward and away from each other. This is such a brilliant and beautiful poem, one of Rich's best. (The other great one for me is "Splitting.") There is deep sadness here, and a sense of being broken by a life that is much more powerful and vaster than our intentions had led us to believe when we thought we could set goals and reach them. So what can we do? Throw away the myths and seek what treasure remains in the devastation of our dreams. And the treasure is there, obscured, but there. The fact that the book of myths will remain, but our names will not appear in it is very hopeful.  Further, I believe that the poem is one of the great poems of our time. It is a poem of disaster, with a willingness to look into it deeply and steadily, to learn whatever dreadful information it contains, to accept it, to be part of it, not as victim, but as survivor. The wreck represents the battered hulk of the sexual definitions of the past, which Rich, as an underwater explorer, must search for evidence of what can be salvaged. Only those who have managed to survive the wreck--women isolated from any meaningful participation or voice in forces that led to the disaster--are in a position to write its epitaph and their own names in new books.

Final Notation by Adrienne Rich

Final Notation by Adrienne Rich

Introduction and Theme

Final Notations is thematically an ambiguous poem. The poem is not understood because of the flowing imagery or stylistically presented issues, but because of the reader’s individual perception of the poem. We can say that unlike Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers, which has a few fixed themes and issues, Final Notations is infinite in its interpretations.

Final Notation is a cultural, political and personally emotional poem which has been written in a simple and neat style with careful economy of words. The poet is experiencing new lifestyles, sexual issues, motherhood tensions, friendship or even doctor patient relationship. Final notations shows the last message of the poet or the New World Order of a colonial power when it has controlled a territory or is coming to control it.

In short, we can say that Final Notation shows us things which are difficult at first become easy, things which are strange at one time, become familiar at another, things which may seem painful, but become joyful and pleasant which encountered and things which people apparently looking disgusting in the first impressions, later become our heart and soul with the passage of time.

A Critique of Final Notations

Introduction

This is a fine, simple and little piece of poetry. The speaker is taken to be a lover and the addressee is the beloved. The lover is telling the beloved how to make love. The relationship between man and woman is very complex and this is the point to which the poem alludes.

The poem also shows a pregnant woman who is going to be operated on by her doctor and the doctor is giving instructions to the patients on how to react in this operation or is trying to reassuring the patient so that the seemingly difficult operation for the patient should be completed without any complication.

The poem has layers of meanings and open to various interpretations and the reader should be feel at large to interpret the poem at whatever level he wants. However, the approach suggested for the reader is three-fold. The first is male-female relationship, doctor-patient relationship and the policy of the colonial powers with the poor nations. Though some people might not agree, the poem does have imperialistic allusions in it structure and the American dominating attitude towards the world at large.

The poem is structurally simple, but thematically complex. The language is neat and no difficult word used, but the use of structure is ambiguous.

Development of Thought

Doctor-Patient relationship
The only complete analogy and supposition found in the poem is that a pregnant woman is lying before the doctor, may be to be delivered or her first visit to the doctor regarding her pregnancy. When the doctor is giving her instructions about the new experience. Though it looks difficult, yet

It will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
It will not be long, it will occupy your thought

The procedure is not long. Normally, it takes a few minutes unless complications arise. The child seemingly so disturbing and troubling in the belly of the mother after a short time and struggle on part of the woman will be delivered. As she says,

It will be short, it will take all your breath

The procedure may be difficult for some women who are taking this first experience, but it is very simple if it taken to be so. The few months of pregnancy are touching and delicate, special care needs to be taken, the overall trouble becomes a reward for the mother. As the doctor is says,

It will be simple; it will become your will.

The disturbing child in the belly ironically becomes the passion, will and the centre of full attention for the mother. The wants to get rid of the child during the delivery, but after the child is born, it becomes the most important thing of the world for her.

Lover and beloved relationship

It will not be simple, it will not be long
It will take little time, it will take all your thought
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath.
It will be short, it will not be simple.

A young girl, running towards teens, feels a number of strange romantic and ideal desires, looks for partners and once finding a partner becomes terrified at the idea of physical relationship. As the woman, however bold or open-hearted, is naturally shy and repressed, is unable to understand the nature of the first physical union.   Ultimately the responsibility is left to the lover who in a small and brief style tries to explain the importance and process of this newfound physical relationship. The nature of this relationship is not simple, but once experienced, it will bring abundance of joys in the life the partner. This physical relationship may be the first one in the life of unmarried woman or may be the first on the first marriage night in which the lover is trying to make physical contacts. Thus things seemingly looking dangerous or troubling are sometimes sweet in actual experience.

Sexual Harassment in the Final Notations

It will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
It will not be long, it will occupy your thought
It a city occupied, as a bed is occupied
It will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

The modern world is the age of harassment especially for women. The young girls let loose for various experiences in the name of freedom and modernity or broadmindedness fall a prey to such harassment where studs try to encourage these young modern girls into such physical activities. These studs gradually make women slave to their own appetites; they occupy their bed like a ruler occupies a city. They leave them no options but be ruled and controlled by their passions.  The studs use various tactics to convince their new prey of the physical contact. The newborn and uncontrolled desires in women ultimately lead them astray without proper management or responsibility of their parents.

Theme of Eagerness and Oneness in Love

It will be short, it will take all your breath
It will be simple, it will become your will

Final Notations can also be taken to be a pure love poem in which the poet wants to achieve pure love regardless of the metaphysical speculations of Donne or casualness of Surrey-Wyatt in a concise and simple language. The most important point in lovemaking is eagerness and wilfulness. It is not difficult to achieve this state if sure determination and seriousness is show. This seriousness leads to oneness of the lovers when love becomes a passion or will of the two.

Unfaithfulness of the lover

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
You are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
You are taking parts of us into places never planned
You are going far away with pieces of our lives

The lover has left her beloved and went on to establish relations with some other woman and as a result he leaves a note behind giving her instructions that she should forget him. The above lines are an ample proof of this interpretation. The beloved outbursts into the above lines. The repetition of ‘coming into’ reinforces the idea of establishing relation with the beloved first and the phrase ‘pieces of life’ symbolises faithlessness and quit love on part of the lover. The love once developed in the beloved by the lover is disintegrating and those pieces are being shared by the lover with some body else.

Style, Imagery, Symbolism and Technique

The style of the poem is simple. There is no stylistic ambiguity. The only ambiguity lies in the nature of theme or the message of the speaker and also the identity of the speaker and the addressee needs to be resolved by different speculations from the reader. The themes of the poem range from personal to social, medical, psychological, political and emotional.
The repetition of different lines and words show intensity and importance of the theme (though theme is not directly addressed by the poet, it is to be explicated by the reader on the strength of his speculation. The lines are erratic which symbolise the complexity of the theme, again whatever it may be.
The title has been made ambitious. Does it related to music, dictation or what? In short, the poem is not rich in great images or symbols. The only thing important about the poem is complexity and that is what it is rich in.

Conclusion

Cutting the long story short, we can say that the poem depends on the experience of the reader for various interpretations. The complexity of the poem is also caused by the extreme subjectivity in the poem. The poem is too personal to understand in its true perspective. This complexity is the typical characteristic of modern American poetry which is based on confessional and experimental nature of their artists.

RAPE OF THE LOCK text line 445 onwards

Casting n gathering by seamus heaney some points

Casting and gathering
This poem is all about the experience of life but in heaneyz own way
A river is depicted in yhe poem , two banks represnts rightist and leftist
The title is quite significant in this poem
Casting ,throwing or sowing while gathering most probably represent the harvesting???
[12/14, 8:06 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: This poem pertain  two belief of progress  positive and negative  ideologies about life.main theme is contraries loss on one is the gain of other theses process of loss and gain essential for every one . Left and right both side people are engaged in their activities profoundly .. these poem show the activities of people on land and sea..
[12/14, 8:07 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Here again an anecdotal beginning of the poem
When v start to read the poem it appears as if a story is going to be told by the poet but it only consists of a single vers
[12/14, 8:09 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Also depict the Irish history same In this poem..
[12/14, 8:10 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: But this one  poem is for all age I think
[12/14, 8:12 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Its acctually about the struggle of human beings from the very beginning of the life so thats why years and years ago is
Being said by the poet
And the voice was always there some in favour while others against
Its all about the two extremes
One side says a thing while other differs
People always had queries about the systems
[12/14, 8:12 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: In very last of the poem he told the process of loss and gain ..this process constantly continue uptill the day of judgment..
[12/14, 8:12 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Yup
It is its all about the social jugement
[12/14, 8:14 PM] Pu Naila Aun: The workers kept on working while the sounds the voices ,either revolutionary or Protestant always prevailed
[12/14, 8:18 PM] Pu Naila Aun: On left bank people r busy in sowing on the other hand machines r harvesting obviously the machines can not work on their own , the human hands would be the operators but and in the river nets r being droped and noise r being raised by whom? By the believers of two diffrent ideologies
[12/14, 8:24 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Yup
When i was reeading the poem and was trying to explain the symbols used by poet it reminded me an english movie
The movie is about a laureate "the beautiful mind"
In that movie the hero of the movie was used to decode the ciphers
So when i was reading i felt that me too decoding the words of poet to assess what he acctually wished to say
When v explain a work of a poet v try our level best to decode his words but v can never achiev the real meanings or the state of the mind of a poet about a poem compossed by him
[12/14, 8:25 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Richating activity show the human being new invention like modren man they are busy to building a huge building and invent new machinery by their hands..
[12/14, 8:30 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Yes when we have ability to decode the writer words we can make our explanation best.
[12/14, 8:32 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Comimg back to the topic
In 3rd quatrain poet stats about his plight that he is neither fully awake nor dreamy but now is come of age and has gaind sort of a maturity and have seen both the sides  closly, each side is busy in his work yet they r giving voice to their views one side says an individual can not play any role in the society( who probably followed to the philosophical views Rousseau who voiced to the individual freedom, the captilists)
While the other group saying that u r every thing  like Hegel'z philosophy absolute authority of society ,,, socialist z
[12/14, 8:37 PM] Pu Naila Aun: But here heaney presents his own point of view that both r right in their views and then he gives an example of farming
Where one sows ,other reaps but the sole object of both is to grow grains for whom? Of course humans so the main purpose of both is to grow for the betterment of humans so how any of them can be assessed of  doing wrong
[12/14, 8:38 PM] Pu Amaya Noor: Yes right know about Rousseau philosophy man is social animal can't survive individualy in society can explain hegal philosophy ..
[12/14, 8:38 PM] Pu Naila Aun: Ots all about to walk between two extrems and at the diffrence of opinion should not judge any one as a wrong doer
While he is presenting his ideas, his point of views

Novel-I~Suggested Questions For Tale Of Two Cities

Novel-I~Suggested Questions For Tale Of Two Cities

1. How sympathetic is Dickens towards the French Revolution? Which details illustrate his revulsion or attraction to the movement?

2. Compare the adherence to traditional gender roles by Lucie Manette and Madame Defarge. Is Dickens constrained by literary or social conventions, for example by making a manly woman the villain and a feminine woman the sentimental heroine?

3. How does religion color the attitudes of the characters in this novel? Compare Sydney Carton to Lucie Manette, or Jerry Cruncher to the Defarges.

4. Does the plot's reliance on fate and coincidence--including the resemblance of Carton to Darnay, the discovery of Dr. Manette's document, and the double recognition of Solomon Pross a.k.a. John Barsad by Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher--make the story less believable or less powerful?

5. How does Dickens reconcile his distaste for the Revolution with his identity as a social crusader? Does he believe in the people's right to revolt under an oppressive government?

6. Examine the motifs of light and darkness in this novel, and trace how they relate to Carton, Lucie, Dr. Manette, and/or Madame Defarge's character development.

7. The most recurrent criticism of this novel is that the characters do not have the psychological depth or development of other Dickensian figures. Does Sydney Carton's transformation undermine this claim? Is this criticism really fair toward the other characters?

8. Examine the theme of resurrection in the novel. Which characters are brought back to life and how? Is there any situation from which resurrection is impossible?

9. Dickens focuses mostly on the lower class in France, but what sense does he give of the lower class in England? Why was there no comparable class struggle in the same era?

10. Analyze Dickens's descriptions of mobs in England and in France. How do they differ? What makes a mob what it is? How do mobs make decisions?