Adrienne Rich dives into the new underwater world and is uncertain of her surroundings. Rich's poem "Diving into the Wreck " is about a female who dives into a shipwreck and explores the area for "treasure ". Soon after she has been exposed to this new underwater world long enough she becomes one with her environment and the native merpeople who live there. Adrienne Rich lived during the mid-twentieth century which was a difficult time for women to find a proper place in society rather than leading a life predetermined by gender roles. Women struggled in order to leave the social trap, but even when they do the rest of the society rejects them because they are not men. This was an opportunity for Rich to try to get the word of the common woman and into the mind of others. Rich uses the diving metaphor and symbolism to convey her thoughts and ideals on how it was to have a woman attempt to traverse to a new society in life and overcome the patriarchal society.
The diving metaphor is used to explain a female who enters a world where all are equal, unlike the world Rich is living in. Rich then goes on about the diver being alone and how Cousteau's crew was on a "sunlit schooner ". This can be explained as how men are the center of society with a bright light shining down upon them, while the woman is alone in her venture like all the women of the time. Rich lives in a society where women have no power and that men have all the control in society. Throughout this poem Rich gives the reader an insight to what it was like for a woman to reach this new land where everyone was equal to one another. The equality of man and woman can best be described through the stanza about how she is both merman and mermaid and how she is one, "I am she: I am he. " Rich speaks of treasure in the poem that relates to a shipwrecks treasure, but in reality she was explaining about the riches of reaching equality.