Life Lessons from a Sea Snail

This week, I thought I'd share with you one of my favorite poems: "The Chambered Nautilus," by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The background context of this poem is that the narrator has found the broken shell of a chambered nautilus that has washed up on shore. Through the cracks, he can see the individual, nacreous chambers that the creature had built within the spiral shell. He can see that, as the nautilus outgrew each chamber, he would build another that was even larger, sealing up the old cell forever. The narrator finds spiritual inspiration from the "dim dreaming life" of this shell's former tenant.

I love this poem, for one, because it's so wonderfully nautical, but also because it offers an uplifting message to those of us who are growing into our shells, so to speak. It should have especial poignancy and meaning for us staff members at Camp Parsons, because we are, after all, in the business of character development, and our job is to foster the kind of personal growth that this poem advocates.

This poem, by the way, also happens to have been written by the father of one of our most notable Supreme Court Justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

And now, without further ado...

THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

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!