The Chambered Nautilus

Last night before going to bed I was thinking about how I lived on and near the sea for the first half of my life, and I found this poem, and the poem in my previous entry (Water). Three things struck me about the poem - aside from it being a wonderful poem - were the Nautilus shell, which is my favorite, and for me is the most beautiful of all the creatures of the sea. Then is the realization of just how much I miss the sea, having lived in the Chicago area, 1300 miles from the nearest coastline. Lastly, the poem mentions Triton, and my folks’ last boat, a 45 foot cutter-rig sail boat that they lived on for more than twenty years, was named Triton.

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,
Were its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before the 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 the 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 unresisting sea!

- Oliver Wendell Holmes
1858

~ by Thor on November 23, 2006.