On a coast where icebergs drift, the poem captures both their beauty and their menace. The speaker and a companion, unused to such sights, go out and photograph each other with one of these “continents of white” in the background. The ice is calm but immense, shouldering breakers and dwarfing a small schooner that keeps approaching and then turning away, like a dog harrying something far stronger. Watching this, the speaker feels the iceberg’s indifference as a kind of quiet command: it is lovely and almost mindless, yet one touch could be fatal. That thought surfaces the image of the Titanic asleep in mud, after casting its human cargo into the sea. The mood is hushed, cold, and quietly ominous—wonder shadowed by danger.
New Found Land — Summary
Whiteness enough off that coast to last a summer, with chunks sized to drift among swells like lost boats rising bottoms up to glimmer,
then dropping from a coastal watcher's view halfway from here to wherever it is sky comes down to touch water, blue on blue,
or even larger continents of white shot through with green, shouldering breakers with unhurried calm, things for night
to break on, or even day. You and I, not having seen such before, go out to frame each other with one in a camera's eye
and watch a schooner nosing among bays scalloped along fringes of the beast. The little ship goes near, but turns away
over and over to run, a cur who knows how strong the behemoth it harries, how final its mere touch. The white rock nothing notes, but wades along,
a mindless thing, and yet it knows command: we think of the Titanic, sleeping in her mud -- having discharged frail cargo on the sea.