Teo 1

Jacy Teo
Professor Kevin Riordan
HL1001: Intro to the Study of Literature
26th October 2016
The Great Leveller
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich and The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot both address the human attempt to wrest
control of time. However, while the narrator of Diving into the Wreck
comes to comprehend and respect that her humanity is very insignificant
in the passage of Time, Prufrock in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
struggles to accept that he cannot outmanoeuvre Time. Diving ends
with a note of acceptance, and Prufrock ends with mourning.
Firstly, Rich and Eliot turn ordinary things into symbols to physicalise
their narrators preoccupations with mastering Time. From its beginning,
Prufrock contains sordid, banal images of places and objects,
establishing its focus on a material experience of the world. It conjures up
backdrops of one-night cheap hotels (Eliot 6) and yellow fog upon
the pools that stand in drains (Eliot 15-18), establishing a strangely
seedy and unctuous setting for a love song and muddying the clarity of
the passage of time in the narrative. As the poem progresses, Prufrock
employs banal daily tools to stall times flow with the taking of a toast
and tea (Eliot 34) and by measur[ing] out [his] life with coffee spoons
(Eliot 51).

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Like Eliot, Rich uses the tangible nature of objects to anchor the
audience to a material awareness. Diving engages with physicality from
its very introduction, with an interactive inventory-listing of items:
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask. (Rich 1-7)
Nearly every succeeding line contains an object in use, painting a
detailed and active opening. Rich and Eliot outline their narrators through
a corporeal comprehension of the world, depicting time as just another
commodity.
However, the poems split ways the further they progress. Prufrocks
obsession with delaying time surfaces in the diction of the love song, with
indecisions (Eliot 32), revisions (33), and a constant refrain declaring
There will be time (23, 26, 28, 37). This delay persists for most of the
poem until an abrupt turn in its final stanzas, where Prufrock misses the
moment of [his] greatness (Eliot 84) and falls into a dull, resenting kind of
regret where he becomes preoccupied with his age and mortality (I grow

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old I grow old / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. / Shall I
part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? [Eliot 120-122]).
On the other hand, Diving experiences a more substantial
shift as it continues. The beginning stanzas of the poem have a brief, curt
rhythm, many lines stoppered by punctuation and ending in as little as
one word. However, after the narrator crawl[s] (Rich 30) down the
ladder into the water, the rhythmic structure of the poem transforms: lines
run more fluidly and drop into the next, entire stanzas flowing without
needing punctuation until their last lines. The tension and discomfort
created with the opening lines dissipates, and the reader shares in the
narrators experience of the space and limitlessness of the ocean. Unlike
in Prufrock, where the personas fear tumbles into regret, fear in
Diving transmutes into release.
Diving succeeds in how it finds reconciliation and peace with Time.
The narrator moves from feeling like an insect (Rich 30), and whose
flippers cripple [her] (29), to realising that the sea is not a question of
power (40), and finally deciding that This is the place (71). The sea, a
body of nature that is vast and virtually primordial and eternal, is much
like Time. The narrators struggle to enter the water initially indicates that
the ocean (and Time) might be a dangerous and unwelcoming thing, but
the audience learns with her that the sea is another story (39) it
simply, with no guile or hostility, does not care that she is in it. After she
accepts that she does not affect it, she learns to turn [her] body without
force (42). This is why the artefacts introduced in the beginning of the

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poem take on a mystic, abstract quality in the conclusion. Her prior
understanding of the items has been upended, like how they are now
listed in reverse order.
Richs choice of wording is crucial: her narrator does not dive to the
wreck, but into it, suggesting a subliminal merging of elements. She
comes to look for the thing itself and not the myth (Rich 63) Time, and
not its reputation and finally discovers and revels in Times absolute
totality, where our names do not appear (94). With Time as something
that has come before, now contains, and will surpass her, the narrator
finds safety in her ephemerality, kindling a transcendental understanding
of her relationship with the rest of humanity where I am she: I am he
(77) and We are, I am, you are (87).
In contrast, Love Song waxes inconclusive as it unfolds. Unlike the
narrator in Diving, who turns her unease into empowerment, Prufrock is
increasingly wound by the thought of his mortality. He contradicts himself
when he says, I am no prophet (Eliot 83), but continues to avoid asking
the overwhelming question by prophesising that his lovers answer will
be one of disdain (If one Should say: That is not what I meant at all.
[96-98]). Eliot uses repetition not only to express Prufrocks vain hope to
detain times progression, but simultaneously slow and frustrate the
reader to turn them into a participant of Prufrocks theorising. Rather than
sharing found tranquillity with the reader like in Diving, Love Song is
determined to make the reader suffer along.

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Despite their great differences in tone and destination, Prufrock
and Diving both give great attention to the sea. Both understand the
sea as a monolithic entity, and both specifically focus on the oceanic
mythos of the mermaid. This is where the experience of Diving manages
to infantilise Love Song when they are put together the narrator in
Diving metamorphoses into the mermaid whose dark hair / streams
black, the merman in his armored body (Rich 72-73), but Prufrock
continues to skirt the edge of the ocean, walking with the bottoms of
[his] trousers rolled (Eliot 121) and hear[ing] the mermaids singing,
each to each (Eliot 124) as if Prufrock has only barely been able to
glimpse Times impartiality, regarding it with fear and resent, while the
narrator of Diving has already embraced and been subsumed into it.
In conclusion, we can see the disparity between the poems like this:
the mermaid-narrator in Diving will not sing to [Prufrock] (Eliot 125).
Both personas have wrangled with their discomfort about Times
unrelenting passage, but only the mermaid-diver understands that she
can only be at peace by not trying to stop it, while Prufrock continues to
meander at the edge of the sea Till human voices wake us, and we
drown (Eliot 131).

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Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Collected Poems, 19091962 (The Centenary Edition), Faber & Faber, 2002.
Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck. Diving into the Wreck: Poems
1971-1972, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973.