The Imaginary Iceberg

Elizabeth Bishop is one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Though she published only four original volumes of poetry during her lifetime, the originality and refinement of those volumes outshines many of her contemporaries. Bishop’s unique ability to create beauty and narrative through close observation of everyday objects makes her work shine. While poets such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell drew inspiration from their own lives in a confessional form of poetry, Bishop looked outward and engaged with the world.

Bishop wrote much of her first her collection, North & South (1946), while traveling Europe and Northern Africa, and refined the work during a four-year stay in Florida. The tensions between motion and stillness—and between the internal and the external—heavily feature in North & South. Many of the collection’s poems, such as “The Imaginary Iceberg” and “The Fish,” find a way to explore and resolve these tensions.

Poet Biography

Elizabeth Bishop, an only child, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on February 8, 1911. Her father died when she was eight months old. Bishop’s mother, Gertrude May Bishop, suffered mental illness and was institutionalized when Bishop was five. Bishop lived with her maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia until her paternal family gained custody and she returned to Worcester.

Bishop’s physical and emotional health declined in Worcester. She developed asthma and was generally unhappy. Seeing her condition, Bishop’s family sent her to live with her maternal aunt, Maude Bulmer Shepherdson. Due to Bishop’s poor health, she rarely attended school. Shepherdson took over Bishop’s education and introduced her to poets such as Thomas Carlyle and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Bishop briefly studied music at Walnut Hill School. In 1929, she attended Vassar College with hopes of becoming a composer. Bishop’s fear of performance, however, caused her to focus on English instead. While in college, a librarian introduced Bishop to American modernist poet Marianne Moore, who became one of Bishop’s greatest influences and mentors until Moore’s death in 1972. Bishop earned a bachelor’s degree from Vassar in 1934.

Bishop’s father left a substantial inheritance that provided her financial independence. From 1935-37, Bishop traveled across Europe and North Africa with Louise Crane, whom she met in college. Bishop’s first poetry collection, North & South (1946), describes scenes from these early travels and won the Houghton Mifflin Prize for poetry. Bishop infrequently published. Her second collection, Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring (1955), included 18 new poems and won the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1951, Bishop moved to Petrópolis, Brazil, with her partner Lota de Macedo Soares. Bishop’s volume, Questions of Travel (1965), focuses on her experience of Brazil and early childhood in Nova Scotia. Soares took her life in 1967, and Bishop spent more time lecturing in the United States to supplement her inheritance. In 1970, she received the National Book Award for The Complete Poems. Bishop’s last volume of poetry, Geography III, was published in 1976.

Bishop died in 1979 of a cerebral aneurysm. She is buried in Hope Cemetery in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her childhood home in Great Village, Nova Scotia, operates as a non-profit artists' retreat.

Poem Text

Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Imaginary Iceberg.” 1946. The Poetry Hour.

Summary

“The Imaginary Iceberg” describes an imagined scene in which a ship and its occupants come upon an iceberg. The poem’s speaker gives voice to the ship’s occupants. In the first line, the speaker states they would “rather have the iceberg than the ship” (Line 1), despite the iceberg’s inability to travel. The speaker repeats this sentiment and describes the “breathing plain of snow” (Line 6) collected atop the iceberg. The speaker continues by addressing the “solemn floating field” (Line 9) of snow and asks it whether it knows of the iceberg.

The speaker opens the second stanza stating “a sailor’d give his eyes” (Line 12) to see the iceberg as it “rises / and sinks again” (Lines 13-14). The speaker describes the iceberg’s “glassy pinnacles” (Line 14) and how the snow above it moves in “airy twists” (Line 19). The speaker also describes the iceberg’s mass as it “stands and stares” (Line 23).

In the third and final stanza, the speaker compares the iceberg to “jewelry” (Line 25) with reflective internal “facets” (Line 24). The speaker briefly considers the iceberg in the context of the surrounding environment before saying “[g]ood-bye” (Line 29) to the structure. At Line 29, the ship moves from the iceberg, and the speaker begins to reflect on the experience of viewing the large mass of ice. The speaker finishes the poem stating “[i]cebergs behoove the soul” (Line 32), as both are “self-made from elements least visible” (Line 33).