19 pages • 38 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopThe Imaginary Iceberg
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Travel and Imagination
“The Imaginary Iceberg” navigates the tensions between travel and the imagination. Some conventional notions of travel depict it as a source of inspiration, or as something that allows an individual to see the world in new ways. Bishop draws upon these connotations by setting her poem on a ship in the midst of a journey. As a practical vehicle for ocean travel, the ship represents the motion and the process of travel. Ships do not stay in the ocean, but travel from port to port. The imagined iceberg, by contrast, represents stability in the shifting ocean (See: Symbols & Motifs).
The poem’s opening line, “We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship” (Line 1), establishes that the iceberg and the ship exist in tension with one another, which is largely the result of the ship’s essential relationship with travel and the iceberg’s “stock-still[ness]” (Line 3). One cannot engage with the iceberg—or with their imagination—without participating in such a stillness. Embracing stillness to explore the imagination means that “The ship’s ignored” (Line 12).
The speaker is in an either/or relationship with both the iceberg and the ship. The speaker explores the iceberg at depth once “the ship’s sails [are] laid upon the sea” (Line 7) and the ship has come to a stop. This either/or mentality, however, does not capture the full truth of the speaker’s actions. The speaker shifts their focus back to the ship—and travel—in the last stanza as “the ship steers off / where waves give in to one another’s waves / and clouds run in a warmer sky” (Lines 29-31). The reference to a “warmer sky” indicates that traveling might take the speaker somewhere outside of the imaginative capacities that generated the cold iceberg. The reference to a giving in “to one another’s waves” (Line 30) also suggests the human connection that the practical elements of travel provide.
The Sublime and the Wonder of Creation
Though the iceberg is Bishop’s poem is imagined, the speaker’s focus on the iceberg as a subject of their poem demonstrates their reverence for nature. Like the romantics from whom Bishop draws inspiration (See: Contextual Analysis), Bishop presents her imaginary iceberg as a sublime subject. For the romantics, the sublime was an overwhelming emotional sensation created through the experience of the natural world. Often, the romantics saw this sensation as a reaction to the sheer scale and terrifying power of natural phenomenon. In this way, the sublime is created through the meeting of the external natural world and the viewer’s internal emotional experience.
The romantics celebrated the sublime in the natural world as a way of paying tribute to the wonder of (often Christian) creation. Bishop takes this wonder and reorients it to focus instead on the secular creativity of the human imagination. The speaker places the natural world and its “artlessly rhetorical” (Line 17) concerns as secondary to the imaginary. The sailor willing “to give his eyes” (Line 12) indicate how much imagination is valued over reality. Though a god is capable of creating a beautiful world, the acts of creation in human imagination work at a faster pace and are unique to each individual. The human imagination also has the capacity to “correct elliptics” (Line 15) in the firmament that appear incorrect to human perception.
Bishop, then, inverts the romantic conception of the sublime. Instead of being an internal reaction to the sheer scale and terrifying power of natural phenomenon, Bishop figures it as a way for the internal imagination to give its scale and power to the natural world. It is important, therefore, that the iceberg remains mostly hidden under the turbulent waters. Most of an iceberg’s mass needs to be imagined before it is a sublime object.
Concealment and Internal Beauty
The poem’s iceberg is an imagined object, but the speaker’s method of engagement with it showcases their ideas about art and natural beauty. The statements that they would “rather have the iceberg than the ship” (Line 1) and that “a sailor’d give his eyes” (Line 12) to see the iceberg’s scene create a hierarchy where the imaginary ranks higher than the real. The speaker confirms this hierarchy with the idea that the iceberg’s “glassy pinnacles [can] / correct” (Lines 14-15) reality.
Only part of the iceberg is visible, and that part is valued for its internality. The line “[t]his iceberg cuts its facets from within” (Line 24) again indicates that the internal takes priority over the external. The speaker also refers to the iceberg as “This iceberg” as a way to reiterate that the iceberg in the poem is unique in its imagined state. The speaker’s turn of phrase reflects how people often talk about imagined concepts by focusing on how “this” or “that” aspect differs from reality.
The concealed majority of the iceberg sitting immobile under the “moving marble” (Line 4) complicates the poem’s demonstration of internal beauty. Internal aspects of an object are always partially concealed by the external. The poem navigates these complications with its plural speaker. Since the experience of the iceberg is shared, the poem opens the possibility of a shared imagination. This shared imagination likely reflects the kind of revelation of personal (or imagined) experience possible in poetry.
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