(A Dream)
The subtitle should not be overlooked. The poem represents a dream. It is not a chronicle of reality, but a narrative of something that only happened in the imagination. Lacking awareness of this fact can conceivably cause problems when reading the text since there are certain things that would not make sense considering the poem is written from a first-person perspective.
Directed as by madness mere
Against a stolid iceberg steer,
It is a likely presumption on the part of most people that whenever a collision occurs between a ship and iceberg that it is purely by accident. The speaker here describes something quite different. What he is describing (again, in a dream) is a ship (there is not description of a human crew or passengers at any stage of the poem) being purposely run into an iceberg. An act of sheer madness seems to be the only possible explanation.
No other movement save the foundering wreck.
When the ship runs into the iceberg, it creates an avalanche of ice that falls down upon it. Other than that, however, the collision has no noticeable effect on the berg. The iceberg does not move or shudder. The only thing that moves following the impact is the ship.
No thrill transmitted stirred the lock
Of jack-straw needle-ice at base;
Towers undermined by waves—the block
Atilt impending—kept their place.
Seals, dozing sleek on sliddery ledges
Slipt never, when by loftier edges
Through very inertia overthrown,
The impetuous ship in bafflement went down.
Remember, the ship seemed to purposely be steered right into the iceberg as if by madness. The result being this litany of imagery revealing all the effects that the ship did not have upon the iceberg. It is truly a fascinating means of telling a story about what did happen to frame it as a narrative of cause without effect. The thin needles of ice subject to breakage do no break, towers which could be loosened by powerful waves do not fall, sleeping seals remain undisturbed. The ship, however, suffers immediately the anticipated effects caused by such a virtuoso display of impetuously ill-advised navigation.
Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one—
A lumbering lubbard loitering slow,
Impingers rue thee and go down,
A nifty bit of alliteration is engaged here to describe the iceberg as less than sophisticated. It is nature in its most brutal, primal and simplistic form. Lacking brains and possessing a brawn that exists only by virtue of size and shape and material. And yet, despite this, it is man in all his implicated evolutionary superiority that winds up ruing the showdown. The iceberg wins and man loses. Primal nature wins over evolutionary progress. The simplistic literary device of alliteration—one of the easiest to introduce—adds an additional layer to the idea of the iceberg as lacking sophistication, but winding up as un-refuted victor in the battle of wills portrayed in the narrative.
