Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Lines 22-24
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
- Some more about that smart great ship that's growing at the same time the iceberg is growing too (notice Iceberg is also capitalized). We definitely feel an equal but opposite feeling going on here between creation and destruction that's symbolized respectively as the ship and iceberg.
- And since the destructive part (iceberg) is growing in shadowy silent distance, the speaker may be suggesting that the more chaotic aspects of the Immanent Will are harder to see and understand.
- That makes sense when we think of some of those big mysteries in life related to life and death that we just can't understand all the time. The easy stuff is, well, easy to understand, but the chaotic, more "sinister" stuff—not so much.
- So again we see the speaker juxtaposing opposites here to maybe accent that life is made up of opposing forces that work together in a kind of cosmic unity. It sounds weird and groovy, but it makes more sense when we imagine the iceberg and Titanic "growing" at the same time.
- And no matter how smart and graceful a thing may be, it's still susceptible to both forces that are hard to fully anticipate or explain.
- The alliteration in "shadowy silent" distance draws our ear to the speaker's point that this sort of plan is just as mysterious to understand as the actual collision of these unseen forces. It's kind of like the universe itself that we recognize as being both creative and destructive, but we're still trying to put the pieces together.