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As indicated by the poem’s title, “Diving into the Wreck” is structured as a descent. In Western literature, descent narratives are often modeled on a cosmic hierarchy that stems from Greco-Roman culture and, later, from Christian theology. According to this hierarchy, humans live on earth, and somewhere beneath the earth there exists a world where humans go when they die. For the Greeks and Romans, this world was known as the underworld, which is where everyone goes at the time of their death. For the Christians, this underworld became associated with Hell, an infernal region of pain and torment reserved only for those damned souls not saved by God’s grace. Both the Greco-Roman and Christian traditions have produced key narratives where humans from the living world descend into the world below. The protagonists of Homer’s The Odyssey and Virgil’s The Aeneid both descend into the underworld. Likewise, Dante Alighieri depicts his own fictional descent into Hell in Inferno. In each of these different cases, the descent is a harrowing journey that reveals important moral or theological truths about the nature of existence.

Although the speaker of Rich’s poem doesn’t descend into a mythological underworld, their underwater journey does echo the descents of Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante. This journey begins with the climb down the ladder from the boat into the water. The speaker narrates this initial descent in lines 22–28:

     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 emphasizes the speaker’s downward trajectory. The descent narrative continues in lines 34–36: 

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

Now submerged, the speaker plunges into increasingly dark water. The compression that comes with depth exerts pressure on the speaker’s body and makes them feel like they might lose consciousness. Like previous explorers of the underworld, the speaker must figure out how to navigate “in the deep element” (line 43). They must also 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). But the speaker does eventually remember their mission, which is to investigate a mysterious shipwreck. Although the details remain obscure, what is clear is that the speaker’s investigation may reveal forgotten truths that could have a transformative impact.

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