I paid particular attention to Culler’s mention of rhetorics being seen as the element that most readers, myself included, write off as pretty, but ultimately pointless wordplay. Quote, “When poetry has been attacked or denigrated, it has been as deceptive or frivolous rhetoric that misleads citizens and calls up extravagant desires.”(pg70)  However, he does remind me that poetry does allow writers an attempt to express their thoughts and emotions better than if they were simply writing them down in descriptive, yet dull, context. Culler specifically mentions four “master tropes” that allow rhetoric figures to have a semblance of disciplined language, albeit with a figurative structure, and therefore permit these literary devices to have relevance and substance. Metaphor and metonymy are two such tropes and both are prevalent in Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck”.

I read this poem about four times before making my annotation. I tried to remember what Culler said about interpreting poems; to assume it’s a structure in itself, and use the imagery to see the world differently including “appreciating what other observers would be trivial or oppressive”. Initially, it sounded of someone “waxing poetic” about their wreck-diving trip. I noticed the use of metonyms such as her description of the wreck and the laid open bare hull with its contents left to rot. And then I began to think of this detailed wreck, “whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot”, as a metaphor for a person’s introspection. Broken, weighed down, scattered, suppressed, and silenced “whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes”, completely aware of the pain, lack of freedom to express the rich character of their gold-filled hold. This person could be a stand-in for women’s rights or it could just be one individual feeling “trapped beneath the waves”. Either way, this certainly envokes more attention, more emotion, than had the author simply wrote down that they felt trapped, or held back.

When we get emotional we get invested, and that is what poetry does for us. If we do not dismiss it out of hand, it gives us the potential to see things through other eyes, in a way we can yet understand what they are going through.

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