The Chambered Nautilus Reflection

Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the poem The Chambered Nautilus. I did like the poem, however I thought that it was a little hard to read at times just because of the writing style. So anyway, the poem starts out like this...

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,	5
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair (Holmes).

This is basically saying that the nautilus creature is sailing from place to place. It describes the sirens and the coral reefs.

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 (Holmes)!

The second little paragraph describes how the shell broke. I hate this part. It is hard to go into detail on these things and write more because they really are simple and do not have to say much to get the point across.

As for the rest of the poem, the third paragraph talks about how the creature had worked really hard to build up his shell. Every single year he had to do this, because each year it would grow. Then the fourth paragraph it sounds as if the nautilus is dead. "From thy dead lips a clearer note is born" (Holmes). Finally, the very last and final paragraph is about how his shell got bigger and better each time and how his outgrown shell would stay there in life's unresting sea. I really liked this little poem actually. Other than it being a little hard to read, once you actually got what it was saying, it was really good. I really liked how they incorporated a little bit of mythology in there as well. For example, in the poem it says, " Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!" (Holmes.) I think that this adds a very nice touch (Huff). This would fall somewhere in the Romanticism period because it is filled with detail and uses very descriptive language throughout the whole thing. I think that it would also fall into this category because it still has a little bit of that childlike story element to it.

"801. The Chambered Nautilus. Oliver Wendell Holmes. 1909-14. English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman. The Harvard Classics." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Web. 07 Dec.

Huff, Randall. "'The Chambered Nautilus'." The Facts On File Companion to American Poetry, vol. 1. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2007.Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.