Diving into the Wreck

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Rhyme

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Literary Devices Rhyme

As a poem written in free verse, “Diving into the Wreck” doesn’t place much emphasis at all on rhyme. But that doesn’t mean Rich avoids rhyme altogether. On rare occasions she uses traditional forms of end rhyme and internal rhyme, as in lines 78–80:

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

More often, however, Rich features forms of rhyme in which the sounds of words merely approximate one another. This technique is known as slant rhyme, and the poem contains several examples, including “rubber” and “flippers” (lines 5 and 6), and “this” and “his” (lines 8 and 9). A more sustained passage in lines 31–35 features several slant rhymes in a row:

and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then

As the final pairing of “then” and “then” indicates, Rich also plays with identical rhyme, which is where a word rhymes with itself. Often the identical rhymes are spaced out, as in the cases of “schooner” and “schooner” (lines 11 and 16) and “down” and “down” (lines 22 and 28). Other times, Rich deliberately repeats the rhyme words in quick succession, as in lines 37–40:

my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power

The range of rhyme forms throughout the poem lends the speaker’s language a subtle poetic quality that nonetheless refuses to draw attention to itself.

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