Diving into the Wreck: Motifs

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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Descent

Overall, “Diving into the Wreck” is structured as a narrative of descent. This descent begins in the second stanza, after the speaker has donned the requisite gear for an underwater dive. In lines 22–28, the speaker narrates their initial descent down the boat ladder:

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.

The repetition of the phrase “I go down” in the first and last lines of this passage emphasize the speaker’s downward trajectory. The descent narrative continues in lines 34–36, after the speaker is submerged:

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out

The density of color words in this brief passage mimics the increasing pressure that comes at greater depths, thereby evoking the speaker’s descent. Consider, too, how the shift from “blue” to “bluer” emphasizes the water’s darkening color as the speaker dives deeper. Soon after the water gets “bluer,” it goes “black,” eventually making the speaker feel like they’re “blacking out.” Compression forces the speaker to struggle to stay focused on their mission, since the physical and mental challenges of the descent make it “easy to forget / what I came for” (lines 44–45). Once they’ve eventually descended to the ocean floor, they remember and begin to investigate the wreck.

Representation versus Reality

Central to speaker’s journey to investigate the wreck is a general concern about the difference between representation and reality. The poem opens with the speaker declaring that they have already “read the book of myths” (line 1), and it’s their familiarity with this book that apparently motivates their dive. Whatever this book of myths might be, it contains some account of the “wreck” they’re seeking to investigate. The speaker implies as much in lines 52–56:

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.

Here, the speaker asserts the primacy of the wreck. The references they make to “words” likely refer to the book of myths they’ve mentioned previously. As such, they indicate how the words contained in that book offer little more than “purposes” and “maps.” Just as maps are simplified representations of a given territory, the speaker insists that words are simplified representations of reality. Like maps, words help us orient ourselves in the real world, but they are not, in themselves, the world. The speaker reiterates this point in lines 61–63:

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth

That is, the speaker wants a chance to investigate the wreck first-hand to see the reality that the book of myths has likely misrepresented.

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