Elizabeth Bishop's "The Imaginary Iceberg" Part One

Here is a link to the poem online: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-imaginary-iceberg/

“The Imaginary Iceberg” Part One

Ok, so my first poem to absorb was the first in Elizabeth Bishop’s collected works, “The Map,” but my notes are at work, so I’ve moved on to the second poem in the collection, “The Imaginary Iceberg.” This isn’t meant to be a thesis on the poem or a final commentary; it is simply meant to be a record of my thoughts, questions, observations, concerns, admirations, connections, and insights [or failures at insight] on first encountering the poem [usually three or four reads]. My hope is that if anyone else has insights to share, what can accrue will be a useful tool for anyone teaching or reading or thinking through the poem, at least as an entry point and discussion starter. Here goes nothing.

Starting in the first line (I’m going with the assumption that you can follow the link to the poem to read along, or that you can get ahold of a hardcopy), who is the we? Travelers in general? The speaker and a partner (friend of romantic partner)? Why is this choice between icebergs and ships set up?

“breathing plain of snow” begins this characterization of the iceberg, the snow, the sea, the natural as being more alive than the sailors, the ship, the viewer (the writer?). This vivification seems to be preferable to the ship and its “artlessly rhetorical” treaders. That phrase “stock-still” seems cliché to me, and I never realized that it comes from “stalk” still, as in the stalk or trunk of a plant. It dates back to the fifteenth century.

In “The Map” Bishop puns on the word “lies,” and this seems possible here in line 8, as the snow is situated upon the sea, resting there, but also is a sort of fabrication in that it dissolves and returns and in that it covers things up.
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Why would the sailor give his eyes for this scene? That would prevent him from seeing. Maybe there’s something here about a different kind of vision, the vision of the imagination, as this iceberg is imaginary. I find the lines, “its glassy pinnacles / correct elliptics in the sky” confusing but important. First off, I can’t find “elliptics” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. There’s “elliptical” which either means shaped like an ellipse or deliberate obscurity or extreme economy. The latter seems more fitting, and if the glassy pinnacle are correcting elliptics in this sense, I suppose they could be clearing up confusions. What are these elliptics and why do they need correcting?
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The opening seems to suggest that we’d rather have our own destruction than safe predictability, as icebergs are commonly pernicious to ships and safety. But they are also commonly symbolic because of the fact that most of their substance exists below the surface of the water.