Diving into this Poem Revised

Do you remember your first period or your first wet dream? It probably arosed some terror, confusion, and a hint of excitement, but it was just welcoming you into puberty, or the coming of age. Puberty, for most people, was an awkward stage in their lives involving acne, hair growth, and physical developments. Just because your body is physically maturing does not mean that you are emotionally. “Diving Into the Wreck,” by Adrienne Rich, tells a tale of a young girl coming of age who awakens to find that she, and everyone else, is diving into the unknowns of life itself and exploring adolescence while making the transition into adulthood.
In the beginning of the poem, the narrator seems uncertain about who she is. She exemplifies this by describing her gear, or clothing, as “absurd,” “grave,” and “awkward” (1,6-7) and she states that she is venturing off all “alone”(1, 12). These words, in context of the poem, have a negative connotation, as though the clothes she is putting on are unusual and uncomfortable. Her ambiguity resembles the same attitude of a child coming of age. When one comes of age, their body begins to change as a response to puberty, and a lot of teenagers may feel “awkward” or feel that they look “absurd” because they are still adjusting to how their bodies are functioning. Due to this transition, many adolescents begin to feel insecure and as though they are alone because their bodies are changing at different speeds than others. Lack of confidence coupled with fluctuating hormones can often cause loneliness. That emptiness can translate into curiosity and internal confusion about life in general, and how everything around them functions and remains interconnected.
In the first line of the poem, the narrator refers to a “book of myths” that she had read. According to the dictionary, myths are “misrepresentations of the truth”. Seeing as how she is a young girl beginning to blossom into a woman, she has heard the many details of adulthood such as sex and drugs. Instead of listening and absorbing to everything she hears, she wants to explore the adult world and find out for herself what is factual and what is fictional.
The poet then mentions a ladder that hangs off the side of the schooner. The ladder is the trigger to the narrator’s transition into uncovering who she is. Figuratively, and generally, a ladder is supposed to help one move upwards or progress towards a certain target of interest. However, the narrator uses the ladder to move down into the ocean, which is a little contradictory to the concept of a ladder and therefore suggests conflicting ideas. As young adults, people like to question authority and society, and when those thoughts begin to occur, people's outlooks on life and towards them selves begin to blur. It becomes difficult for them to determine what is right and what is wrong, what it is to be considered acceptable and what it is to be rejected. These conflicting ideas that occur internally cause many teenagers to behave in a disfavoring manor and act out by means of rebelling, acting obnoxious, or even causing physical and/ or emotional harm to oneself. Unfortunately, this downward behavior is a necessary process in order to achieve maturity,
The transition continues into the next couple stanzas. The further the narrator travels down the ladder, the closer she comes to attaining adulthood. Becoming of age is a process that gets harder before it gets easier. It can cause a lot of emptiness and confusion, which would explain the reasoning for the narrator to compare herself to a “cripple” and “…an insect” (3, 8-9). She also came off slightly disoriented when Adrienne Rich stated “and there is no one/ to tell me when the ocean/ will begin” (3,10-12). When one is crippled, it usually means they are disabled, or unable to move. The lack of motion Rich was referring to was the narrator’s inability to further progress through a certain time in her life. Her immobility caused the narrator to feel small and insignificant to the world, like an insect, adding on to her insecurities and loneliness. This time she feels more alone because there is no authoritative figure to guide her or instruct her through this time. There is no one to tell her exactly how she is feeling, so she feels as though she cannot be helped. She, like all teenagers, has to find her sense of direction and learn responsibility and all the other traits of growing up. Adrienne Rich begins to transition her character's emotions in the next stanza.
Rich begins to use the fading of color to describe the direction of the narrator’s emotion. She starts off with blue, which has a gloomy and miserable association, and increasingly moves toward black, which usually has a negative connotation. Once the narrator is in the dark she feels most powerful, so powerful that she describes it as pumping through her blood. Usually, one would feel more lost and alone in the dark because they become blind to most things due to their inability to see. However, the narrator turns her weakness and her vulnerability into something beneficial that empowers her and fuels her to become better and stronger. By doing so, she is proving to herself and the reader that is overcoming her fears of the unknown and is ready to advance to the next level in life, which would be growing up.
Eventually, the narrator comes to a realization in stanza eight. This is where everything comes together for her and she becomes enlightened. She claims that she had found a place (8,1) and then refers to herself as a woman and a man in the form of a “mermaid” and “merman” (8, 2-3). The place she is referring to is the time and place that she figures out that she is not alone and that everyone, both men and women, undergo what she has experienced at one point in their lives. That is when the change of using the word “I”, referring to single and alone, to “we,” implying unity, begins. In the last line, Rich goes back to using the phrase “I,” however, the context is different because Adrienne Rich uses the colon symbol, which also represents a ratio to suggest and/ or prove that both woman and man are alike in this journey in life.
In the last stanza, Adrienne Rich wrote, “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” (10, 1-8). By restating the first stanza in a different tone and perspective, Rich was trying to emphasize the metamorphosis in the narrator. The narrator no longer viewed herself as awkward and alone. Instead, she found out through cowardice and courage the truths of the myth and figured out that she is not alone and was never alone on her journey through early adulthood. Rich claims that their names do not appear in the book of myths because the book of myths applies to nobody specific, but to universally everybody.
Growing up is often a difficult stage in one's life. It is filled with insecurities and emotional isolation, which results in questionable thoughts and behavior. Adrienne Rich was able to capture this stage of life and compare it to a deep sea adventure, diving into the unknown abyss, by which she means life. Although we all struggle with life individually, we are all experiencing the same emotions and inner conflicts just like the rest of the world.