The Chambered Nautilus

“The Last Leaf” by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1833)

This poem uses a natural phenomenon (the leaf) to personify a human condition (mortality), much as the chambered nautilus is used to discuss spirituality. The poem uses the majority of its eight stanzas to describe an old man who seems to the speaker to be from an outdated era. The man, who was once attractive, but “the pruning-knife of Time” (Line 8) now causes him to use a “cane” (Line 6) and there’s a “melancholy crack / In his laugh” (Lines 35-36). While this poem deals less with the spiritual and more with the physical, it still has an echo of the later poem in the lines:

if I should live to be

The last leaf upon the tree

     In the spring,

Let them smile, as I do now

at the old forsaken bough (Lines 43-47).

Here, humanity and understanding are also on display as in “The Chambered Nautilus.”

“La Maison D’Or” by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1890)

Subtitled “Bar Harbor,” this poem deals with another observation of the sea, this time off the coast of Maine. The town of Bar Harbor is on Mount Desert Island, which looks out to Frenchman’s Bay on one side and the mountains of Acadia National Park on the other. Holmes uses the locale to discuss the “warm sheltering walls of life [that] divide / time and its tides from still eternity” (Lines 3-4). The poem suggests that the “stormy [waves] teach / [t]hat not on earth may toil and struggles cease” (Lines 5-6), an idea echoed in the dangerous waters that wreck “The Chambered Nautilus” as well as its work to create successive houses. The poems each end similarly, with “Bar Harbor” noting the mountain’s “silent promise of eternal peace” (Line 8)—an echo of the soul outgrowing “life’s unresting sea” (Line 35) in “The Chambered Nautilus.”

“Cacoethes Scribendi” by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1890)

Cacoëthes scribendi, a Latin phrase coined to describe the uncontrolled urge to write, provides the title to this 12-line poem that employs rhyming couplets. Like “The Chambered Nautilus,” the poem deals with successive attempts at growth, compelled to go forward into a new chamber. Even faced with annihilation, essentially wrecked like the nautilus, the “human race should write, and write, and write” (Line 8) even if “the inkstand was an empty cup” (Line 10). The effort to keep building again is portrayed in the image of the “scribblers clustered around [the cup’s] brink / Call[ing] for more pens, more paper, and more ink” (Lines 11-12).

“The World Is Too Much With Us” by William Wordsworth (1802)

This sonnet seems to have, in part, inspired “The Chambered Nautilus” as it echoes verbatim its final line and challenges its call to Paganism. Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet whose work would have been very familiar to Holmes. The speaker of “The Chambered Nautilus” seems to be using an object from the sea to comfort Wordsworth’s speaker and illuminate their differences in opinion regarding the purpose of faith in an increasingly mechanized and scientific world (See: Themes).