The Infatuate Ship
The suggestion that the ship is infatuated with the iceberg and this is the reason it drives into in a form of madness is highly symbolic. If the ship is taken to be a person, then this reading situates the iceberg as any sort of insane compulsion with which a person can become smitten. You know it’s crazy and you know you will probably wind up sinking to the bottom of the sea, but you can’t help yourself. You just drive full steam ahead right into it.
The Iceberg
If the infatuated ship is the person that makes a crazy decision to pursue an illogical goal, the berg is the goal, of course. But as a symbol of an illogical goal, the berg goes beyond that due to its immovability. It is not just a symbol of something that should not be pursued, it is something that is literally beyond comprehension. No ship in its right mind—no matter how infatuated—would drive directly into an iceberg. There is a sense of malevolence in the description of the iceberg; it fits within Melville’s symbolic universe that the thing which is most wicked in the world must be white because we have been conditioned to associate that color with innocence and purity. The iceberg lures not through wicked temptation, but the enticement of virtue.
The Incommunicable
On a grander, metaphorical scale, the iceberg represents the inability to communicate. The ship plows into it and sinks to the bottom for the effort. An entire long, detailed stanza is devoted to explaining the various ways the ship failed to make an impact upon the iceberg. It is a one way stream of communication and the iceberg remains passive, immobile and silent.
Man versus Nature
The poem as a whole can be read an allegorical conflict between man and nature. The ship represents man’s mastery over nature; it can be steered and directed into or against winds and currents. The iceberg, by contrast, is a lumpish loiterer just hanging around and moving incrementally at the will of the water surrounding it. Man is evolutionarily progressive while the iceberg is primeval and dull. And it is the dotard that easily defeats the mechanical.
Indifferent Nature
The iceberg sunken below the cold waters has much in common with the swallows that fly low over the battlefield of Shiloh. And they both connect to whales of Moby-Dick as well as other examples of the natural world that goes on about their business with little care to the passing fancies of man. The men on the ship are of such little importance that they deserve less attention and description than the ice and the animals on the berg. Just as the swallows soar over empty fields where once men slaughtered each other, the slaughter the berg has caused aboard the ship is of little consequence. The world goes on.
