Poetic Analysis

Design by Robert Frost, Casabianaca by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, and Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich are all poetic pieces that use imagery in some way. Frost paints images of brightness and darkness with his words in Design, beginning with a "dimpled spider, fat and white," in line 1, and continuing to "assorted characters of death and blight" in line 4. Interestingly, Hemans repeats "the flames roll'd on" in lines 9 and 20 of Casabianca, indicating the inevitability of the boy’s nearing death. Adrienne Rich uses several different images, the most striking, in my opinion, being in lines 90-94, “this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.” These are the same objects that she starts with in the beginning of the poem, the knife symbolizing, perhaps protection and the camera, memory of the past.

On the surface, Diving into the Wreck seems to tell a simple story of a woman diving down to the site of a shipwreck. However, in lines 8-12 Rich exposes the reader to the fact that she is actually referring to something much deeper by explaining “I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone.” I interpreted it as a coming-of-age story, the dive being a metaphor of the girl’s journey to womanhood. Rich uses several images to parallel what is actually happening in the girl’s life. The second stanza introduces a ladder that “is always there hanging innocently.” The ladder is the connecter between the ship (her innocence) and the water (a dark and unfamiliar place, womanhood). Rich continues in the third stanza to describe the girl’s journey down the ladder, mentioning that the flippers are crippling her, which seems to suggest that she is somewhat uncomfortable in making this journey. Rich then describes the colors of the air above water as blue and green, then as the girl descends into the water, it becomes dark and she begins to black out, which suggests that things are becoming overwhelming for her. She reminds herself to stay focused and instead of focusing on her “wreck,” to look to the future. Beginning around line 61, the girl realizes that she has come to forget about her past and to learn from it instead of regretting it. Also, the poem makes a shift from dark, black images to a lighter one, suggested by line 64-64, “drowned face always staring toward the sun.” Later, in lines 71-75, she has reached the “wreck.” It seems that the point Rich is trying to make is that entering adulthood is a demanding stage of life that should be viewed as a learning process.