We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship, <br />although it meant the end of travel. <br />Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock <br />and all the sea were moving marble. <br />We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship; <br />we'd rather own this breathing plain of snow <br />though the ship's sails were laid upon the sea <br />as the snow lies undissolved upon the water. <br />O solemn, floating field, <br />are you aware an iceberg takes repose <br />with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows? <br /> <br />This is a scene a sailor'd give his eyes for. <br />The ship's ignored. The iceberg rises <br />and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles <br />correct elliptics in the sky. <br />This is a scene where he who treads the boards <br />is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain <br />is light enough to rise on finest ropes <br />that airy twists of snow provide. <br />The wits of these white peaks <br />spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares <br />upon a shifting stage and stands and stares. <br /> <br />The iceberg cuts its facets from within. <br />Like jewelry from a grave <br />it saves itself perpetually and adorns <br />only itself, perhaps the snows <br />which so surprise us lying on the sea. <br />Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off <br />where waves give in to one another's waves <br />and clouds run in a warmer sky. <br />Icebergs behoove the soul <br />(both being self-made from elements least visible) <br />to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.<br /><br />Elizabeth Bishop<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-imaginary-iceberg/
