Reflection! The Chambered Nautlis

The poem I chose to do was the poem "The Chambered Nautilus" by Oliver Wendell Holmes. I take a lot of emotion from the poem about the greatness of the sea. "Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea" When taking this literally one would say that it is talking about some sort of shelled creature leaving its old small shell for a larger new shell, also adding that the creature lives in a non resting sea. That is the most literal way you can take it. If you look at in a metaphorical sense you would see it differently, just as see if differently than some of my class mates might. I see it that in a world that never stops, we have to learn to leave some things behind and adapt to the changes around us. It is saying not the sea, in other words world, never rests. Also that leaving your old small things in the past makes your future. "Year after year beheld the silent toil; That spread his lustrous coil; Still, as the spiral grew” Literally, again you could take this as a silent creature who begins to grow over time. Metaphorically though, I see a real symbolic message of life involved. The message is how although we may not speak up as loud as others or be as big as others right away, sometimes it's time that adds up. Someone may come up with this big fabulous speech and look really good, which is a good thing, but there are some people who are just as good you tell people the right thing to do routinely and slowly make the same impact. Sometimes it is even a more lasting impact that the one that was given before by the great speaker. I am not the only who sees these as secret metaphors either! "The specimen before him has had its shell "rent" (broken, line 14, or perhaps sawed in half to reveal its exquisite structure) and "its sunless crypt unsealed;" a metaphor inviting comparison with human architecture." (Huff) He believes that this part of the story displays the connection to the human body. This to me is a HUGE display of Romanticism because it is very descriptive with a hidden meaning. Romanticism is huge on displaying metaphors as well because that uses a lot of emotional and imaginative thinking, instead of logical, like in the Realism, or religiously, like in the Puritan era. The author himself though might have had his own reason for these metaphors. Randell Huff wrote in his literary criticism over The Chambers Nautiluses "Applied to the poet's family history, it suggests that he may have viewed his father's ministry as an advancement over its more fundamentalistic predecessors and his own even more liberal beliefs as an advance over his father's." Huff thinks that his poem have a more emotional meaning to the author, not just what we can read or even imagine of without knowing such information. This is what makes Romanticism so beautiful to me, every little stanza and line can mean something different from person to person’s points of view.



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. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= CPAP0070&SingleRecord=True (accessed December 7, 2011).












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. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= CPAP0070&SingleRecord=True (accessed December 8, 2011).