The Chambered Nautilus

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) was an American poet, physician, and inventor who spent most of his life in New England. Holmes was well-connected in the literary circles of 19th-century New England, befriending such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville. Holmes’s 1859 poem “The Chambered Nautilus” combines a keen observation of the natural world with a spiritual meditation. The speaker of the poem describes the life journey of a chambered nautilus, whose empty shell he finds washed up on the shore. The speaker imagines the nautilus’s journeys across the seas, its lifelong maturation through the growing chambers of it shell, and its final voyage beyond both shell and life. As the poem reaches its culmination, the speaker heeds the wisdom of the nautilus, imagined as a message spoken from the “deep caves of thought” within its spiraling shell.