The physician-poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) belonged to that group of “Fireside Poets” — Bryant, Whittier, James Russell Lowell, Longfellow — of 19th-century American standard authors. Also known as “Schoolroom Poets” or “Household Poets,” they wrote poems that were in fact household poems, in the sense that everybody knew them and could recite them from memory, much in the way that future generations could reel off the jingles of TV commercials. Holmes, whose birthday is today, August 29, contributed to the 19th century’s stock of recitable public-occasion poems with “Old Ironsides,” a eulogy for the United States Ship Constitution, a frigate active during the War of 1812 (which remains the world’s oldest ship still afloat, thanks at least in part to her enshrinement in Holmes’s verse). 

Today’s Poem of the Day, “The Chambered Nautilus,” is the other poem of Holmes’s that has traditionally appeared in American hich-school literature textbooks, the B-side to “Old Ironsides,” Holmes’s hit single. Like his Fireside contemporaries, Holmes could turn his hand to the nature poem, albeit in a Romantic vein that feels at odds with his professional bent as a man of science. In this poem of five rhymed septets, its meter undulating like the movement of the sea, the marine mollusk appears less as an organism in nature than as a vessel for the poet’s contemplation of the soul.  

The Chambered Nautilus
by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

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!

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.