The Chambered Nautilus

“The Chambered Nautilus” is a rhymed and metered poem of five seven-lined stanzas, written by American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. It first appeared in the February 1858 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine of arts and letters, which Holmes helped to establish the year before with other prominent authors of the mid-19th century. The poem is an ode to the sea creature of its title. The chambered nautilus is a cephalopod that houses itself in a beautiful shell, which Holmes uses as a metaphor to discuss human spirituality, mortality, and mental growth. The poem was published in The Atlantic’s “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” series which came out of Holmes’s personal conversations with other Boston intellectuals. These anecdotes, essays, and poems were later published in a separate book of the same name in late 1858. The poem also later appeared in Holmes’s collected works and is widely anthologized in textbooks. Throughout his long career, Holmes was a medical doctor, professor, scientist, essayist, philosopher, and humorist, while also writing poems and novels. His works showed his interest in many varied subjects. “The Chambered Novelist” is one of his most popular and critically acclaimed poems. Due to its even rhyme scheme and rhythm, it was often memorized and recited by school children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Poet Biography

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston on August 29, 1809, the eldest son of Abiel Holmes, a minister, and Sarah Wendell, who was a descendent of Anne Bradstreet, who was the first published North American poet. He had three older sisters and one younger brother. By the age of 13, his perusal of his father’s library inspired him to start writing poetry.

At 15, Holmes was sent to Phillips Academy for formal education. A short year later, Holmes matriculated at Harvard, where he excelled at languages and sought out like-minded scholars. He graduated in 1829. After graduation, Holmes briefly studied law before turning to medicine. Holmes’s early poetry career was simultaneous to the beginnings of his medical career. In 1830, he helped found a short-lived publication at Harvard called The Collegian and contributed several poems. He also published poems in a pamphlet called Illustrations of the Athenaeum Gallery of Paintings.

Holmes was part of a group of Boston poets known as the “Fireside Poets,” which included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Greenleaf Whittier. At the age of 21, troubled by the dismantling of the frigate USS Constitution, Holmes wrote the patriotic poem called “Old Ironsides” (1830) that was published in a Boston newspaper. This poem brought him national attention as it was widely reprinted and was instrumental in saving the ship.

Although Holmes enjoyed literary success, he was not tempted to give up medicine. He apprenticed with Dr. James Jackson, the uncle of his future wife. In 1833, Holmes went to Paris to receive medical training. He was one of the first Americans to embrace the new French clinical methods, which were among the most advanced in the world. Holmes returned to Harvard Medical School, which granted his doctor of medicine in 1836.

In 1837, Holmes’s first volume of poetry was published, but he did not think he would pursue poetry further. He taught briefly at Dartmouth Medical School before returning to Boston to accept a position at Harvard. In 1840, he married Amelia Lee Jackson. They had three children in the first six years of their marriage: Oliver Jr. (1841), who later became an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; Amelia (1843); and Edward (1846).

Holmes was renowned for teaching the use of the stethoscope and microscope with physical diagnosis and was a proponent of medical reform. In 1843, Holmes discovered that puerperal fever, which was causing a high rate of fatalities in child-bearing women, might be eliminated if doctors washed their hands between visits and/or examinations of patients and if the infected clothing and bedding were removed and destroyed. His findings were initially dismissed since germ theory was yet to be understood. In 1855, he defended his work against naysayers, and was vindicated a few years later by other doctors who reached similar conclusions. His essay on the topic is now considered a seminal work.

In 1850, as head of the Harvard Medical School, Holmes agreed to matriculate three Black students and one woman. However, the male student body and faculty protested, and he had to withdraw the offers. He received criticism among his friends at the time, but later, in 1856—together with Francis Underwood, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the other Fireside Poets—Holmes was integral in founding The Atlantic Monthly, even providing its name. The magazine became one of the United States’ most prominent literary magazines and would publish “The Chambered Nautilus” (1858).

Holmes had a regular series in The Atlantic called Autocrat at the Breakfast-Table, made up of humorous verse, and comic prose, which was popular with critics and the public alike. This series was collected into a book of the same name and published to great success. A sequel of more anecdotes was published as The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1859). Elsie Venner, Holmes’s first novel was published in 1861.

As the Civil War began, Holmes published patriotic poems and songs in support of preserving the Union and expressed that slavery was sin, altering his previously held anti-abolitionist beliefs. During this time, he joined the Dante Club, a group contributing to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s efforts to translate Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. This work eventually spanned three volumes and was published in 1867. That same year, Holmes’s second novel The Guardian Angel was published. Along with continuing his medical duties and writing scientific papers, Holmes wrote The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872). In 1877, Pages from an Old Volume of Life, a collection of various essays he had previously written, appeared.

In 1882, at the age of 73, Holmes retired from Harvard Medical School and traveled abroad. In Great Britain, he visited prominent writers like Henry James and Alfred Tennyson. In Paris, he met Louis Pasteur. After returning to the United States, Holmes published his novel A Mortal Antipathy (1885) and a travelog, Our One Hundred Days in Europe (1888). Later years were beset by several tragedies including the death of his youngest son in 1884. Four years later, Holmes’s wife of nearly 50 years died in February and his daughter died the following year after a brief illness. Despite his weakening eyesight, Holmes continued to find solace in writing. In 1891, he published the last of his table-talk books, Over the Teacups. He made his last public appearance in 1893 and died peacefully while taking a nap on October 7, 1894.

Poem Text

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, 

Sails the unshadowed main,— 

The venturous bark that flings 

On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings 

In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings, 

And coral reefs lie bare, 

Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; 

Wrecked is the ship of pearl! 

And every chambered cell, 

Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, 

As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, 

Before thee lies revealed,— 

Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil 

That spread his lustrous coil; 

Still, as the spiral grew, 

He left the past year’s dwelling for the new, 

Stole with soft step its shining archway through, 

Built up its idle door, 

Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, 

Child of the wandering sea, 

Cast from her lap, forlorn! 

From thy dead lips a clearer note is born 

Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn! 

While on mine ear it rings, 

Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 

As the swift seasons roll! 

Leave thy low-vaulted past! 

Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

Holmes, Oliver Wendell Sr. “The Chambered Nautilus.” 1858. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The speaker imagines a cephalopod, the chambered nautilus, afloat in the sea like a ship, with its tentacles unfurled. It moves like a Greek ship through the ocean, among mythic creatures like “the Siren” (Line 5) and mermaids. However, it crashes into the reef and dies. In the present, the speaker holds only the split shell of the nautilus, a remnant of the living creature. They notice its nacre and all the spiral chambers of the shell, noting that the nautilus shaped each new one as it grew. The speaker admires the cephalopod’s efforts, how it gave up the old chamber for the new, personifying its hard work and suggesting it was always focused on the present and did not look back to the past. The speaker gives thanks for finding the shell and realizes it has a message for them. The speaker notes “a voice that sings” (Line 28) that sings to them. There is a lesson in observing the shell’s many chambers. The shell urges that the speaker should continue to grow and leave the past behind. Each new day or year should be “nobler than the last” (Line 32). In this way, the speaker will grow until they reach a state in which they will toss aside their corporeal body—or shell—and enjoy freedom.