The Chambered Nautilus

“The Last Leaf” by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1833)

This poem uses a natural phenomenon (the leaf) to personify a human condition (mortality), much as the chambered nautilus is used to discuss spirituality. The poem uses the majority of its eight stanzas to describe an old man who seems to the speaker to be from an outdated era. The man, who was once attractive, but “the pruning-knife of Time” (Line 8) now causes him to use a “cane” (Line 6) and there’s a “melancholy crack / In his laugh” (Lines 35-36). While this poem deals less with the spiritual and more with the physical, it still has an echo of the later poem in the lines:

if I should live to be

The last leaf upon the tree

     In the spring,

Let them smile, as I do now

at the old forsaken bough (Lines 43-47).

Here, humanity and understanding are also on display as in “The Chambered Nautilus.”

“La Maison D’Or” by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1890)

Subtitled “Bar Harbor,” this poem deals with another observation of the sea, this time off the coast of Maine. The town of Bar Harbor is on Mount Desert Island, which looks out to Frenchman’s Bay on one side and the mountains of Acadia National Park on the other.