20 pages • 40 minutes read
Oliver Wendell HolmesThe Chambered Nautilus
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1858A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: The Fireside Poets
The Fireside Poets—Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier—were a group of 19th-century poets whose popularity was such that their work was read by the fireside in the average American home. They were among the first American poets to garner critical attention home and abroad. Longfellow, in particular, was considered on the same level as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the British Poet Laureate. Ralph Waldo Emerson is sometimes included in the Fireside Poets as well, but he more often wrote prose. Situated in the Northeast, particularly Massachusetts, the men, due to their wealth, intelligence, and spheres of influence, deeply shaped literary taste of the time. The poets seriously believed that good writing could create empathy among its readers, and their work often embraced a didactic tone. They felt that they did not write for other poets but for a general audience and employed American colloquialisms and humor.
Stylistically, as can be seen in “The Chambered Nautilus” by Holmes, the Fireside Poets tended to use standard rhyme and meter in organized forms. This helped make their poems popular for recitation, and their work was often assigned to be studied, adding to the poets’ and their poems popularity and longevity. Their subject matter was traditional, historic, and often patriotic as in Holmes’s “Old Ironsides” and Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860). Lowell and Whittier both used poems to express liberalism and bold anti-slavery messages. By 1904, their style and subject matter was considered old-fashioned and criticized for perpetuating myths of American glory and mimicking English style. They were shortly replaced by the poets of the Harlem Renaissance and the Modernist movement.
Physical Context: The Shell Itself
To fully appreciate the visual imagery in Holmes’s poem, it is helpful to understand the chambered nautilus, a sea creature of the cephalopod family, and its relationship to art. The nautilus lives in the Pacific and Indian Oceans and is difficult to observe in the wild. In the 19th century, they were considered living fossils, related to those specimens found in the early Pleistocene period. Holmes probably relied on scientific accounts for the written allusions in his poem. In life, the nautilus inhabits the different segments of the shell sequentially as it grows. The past chambers are used to help ascension, which is controlled by the density and volume of the liquid within the buoyant shell.
In the 16th century, fishermen found abandoned nautilus shells in coral reefs (See: Further Reading & Resources). Collectors loved their beauty. Cut in half, the shells revealed a spiral of chambers, which were coated in glowing mother of pearl. Collectors in Europe displayed nautilus shells on stands or as bowls due to their beauty, and they often considered them to be works of art: “In the 17th century, silver and goldsmiths transformed nautilus shells into nautilus cups by etching designs into the shell’s exterior, adding intricate gold carvings to the opening of the shell, and setting them upon elaborate bases” (Reinke, Kira. “The Nature of the Nautilus: How the Seashell Has Inspired Artists.” Barnebys.com, 2023). The shells-turned-artwork were often adorned with pictures of mythological sea creatures, gods and goddesses, and mermaids. Nefs were also created, art pieces that fashioned the nautilus’s shell into the bottom of a ship, something that might have inspired Holmes’s imagery in “The Chambered Nautilus.” By the 19th century, with the advent of studying geology, evolution, and natural history in general, nautilus shells were often a commonly displayed item in 19th-century homes—Holmes himself owned one.
