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Rich composed “Diving into the Wreck” in free verse, which means the poem doesn’t have a regular meter. Instead, each line in the poem has a different length. The shortest lines have as few as one or two words, and the longest lines have up to eight or nine words, but most of the lines fall somewhere in between. The different line lengths allow for a mode of expression that is more fluid than a rigid meter otherwise permits. This fluidity of the poetic line may be said to echo the fluid dynamics of the oceanic environment where the poem is set. Yet the metrical fluidity also subtly reaffirms the poem’s larger interest in the uncertainty involved in true exploration. If the speaker is making a literal—and perhaps metaphorical—dive to explore the remains of a shipwreck, they do so to find out what’s been left behind. That is, even though they make their descent with an idea in mind of what they’ll find, they also maintain a sense of anticipation that something unexpected remains to be discovered. The unpredictability of line length very subtly mirrors the unpredictability of exploration.

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