Adrienne Rich and Eavan Boland

In “Diving into the Wreck” Adrienne Rich plunges into an unknown world, recalling the “Eurydice” of H.D.’s poem when Rich's speaker describes the journey downward:

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

Like the speaker in “Eurydice,” Rich’s speaker learns that she can survive in a place she has been taught to distrust. In the poem’s first stanza, Rich’s speaker sets aside a book of myths, a loaded camera and a knife, diving into an unexplored world to “explore the wreck.” Unlike the speaker in “Eurydice,” who learns to embrace and find power in the dark underworld she’s cursed to inhabit, the diver in Rich’s poem consciously chooses to make the plunge. She (or he) has a goal:

The thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth 

But how does Rich’s speaker avoid the problem of telling a story of the wreck? Isn’t that exactly what he or she is doing? In this poem, I read “the thing itself” as a blurry, unknown form. I’m not satisfied with the secondary criticism that claims the wreck is some sort of feminine fantasy. Perhaps that is part of it, but I’m far more interested in the story of the wreck than whatever “the thing itself” might be. I am curious about the speaker, who moves from the first person singular to the plural pronoun, and from the feminine to masculine form in lines 72-77: “And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair / streams black, the merman in his armored body / We circle silently / about the wreck . . . ”

In one of Rich’s earlier poems, “Shooting Script,” the speaker writes: “I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat. / In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.” Something about the sea as uncharted, unexplored, and perhaps forbidden territory makes Rich’s poetry intense and alive for the reader. We are invited to come along for the journey, but we are also aware of the risk.

In “How We Made a New Art on Old Ground,” Eavan Boland offers her readers a similar experience. Boland’s speaker, however, addresses us directly:  

A famous battle happened in this valley.   

                     You never understood the nature poem.   

Till now. Till this moment—if these statements   

                     seem separate, unrelated, follow this   

silence to its edge and you will hear   

                     the history of air: the crispness of a fern   

or the upward cut and turn around of   

                     a fieldfare or thrush written on it.   

The other history is silent: The estuary   

                     is over there. The issue was decided here:   

Two kings prepared to give no quarter.   

                     Then one king and one dead tradition.   

Now the humid dusk, the old wounds   

                     wait for language, for a different truth:   

When you see the silk of the willow   

                     and the wider edge of the river turn   

and grow dark and then darker, then   

                     you will know that the nature poem   

is not the action nor its end: it is   

                     this rust on the gate beside the trees, on

the cattle grid underneath our feet,   

                     on the steering wheel shaft: it is   

an aftermath, an overlay and even in   

                     its own modest way, an art of peace:

I try the word distance and it fills with   

                     sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen   

And as I write valley straw, metal   

                     blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.   

Silence spreads slowly from these words   

                     to those ilex trees half in, half out   

of shadows falling on the shallow ford   

                     of the south bank beside Yellow Island   

as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion   

                     begins to be complete: what we see   

is what the poem says:   

                     evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows—

and whin bushes and a change of weather   

                     about to change them all: what we see is how

the place and the torment of the place are   

                     for this moment free of one another.

I love how Boland uses enjambment: "If these statements / seem separate..." "...follow this / silence..." etc. The reader is invited (maybe even forced) to examine the process of reading the poem, and ultimately offered a chance to participate in the creative act. 

The speakers of both poems self-consciously recognize something elusive and fleeting in “the thing itself,” but almost paradoxically, they each give us a moment where we are freed from even worrying about distinguishing “the thing itself” from the story about the thing, or the place from “the torment of the place.” Rather, Rich and Boland demonstrate that poetry can usher us into a space where we might contemplate “the wreck” for ourselves, without resorting to a narrative that wishes to smother the pursuit.