Poetry for Students

Volume 24 61

and resignation in the creature or person that fol-
lows this advice.

Source:Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on “The Chambered
Nautilus,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Eleanor M. Tilton
In the following essay, Tilton examines the in-
fluence of Holmes’s friend, the historian John
Lothrop Motley, on Holmes’s writing, asserting
that Motley’s influence affected the quality of
Holmes’s work negatively.

In the spring of 1857, Oliver Wendell Holmes
sent to the historian John Lothrop Motley a private
printing of a long poem written two years earlier
for the opening of the 1855 lecture season of the
Boston Mercantile Library Association. In 1857
Holmes seems to have had no plans for publication
of the poem, but evidently felt the need of more
discriminating criticism than the newspaper re-
porters had been in the habit of giving him. By then
his friendship with Motley had reached that degree
of intimacy that made him willing to ask for criti-
cism that Motley felt willing and free to give.

Motley went through the private printing care-
fully, annotating his marks of praise and blame, and
in his covering letter of May 3, he adumbrated his
critical principles. His marginal notes and his letter
provide a revealing illustration of mid-nineteenth-
century sensibility. What would have been regar-
ded in 1857 as the finest taste is recognizably
moribund, an amalgam of elements drawn from the
eighteenth century through Blair’s Lectures on
Rhetoricand of ingredients diluted from German
sources. Blair was known to every American col-
lege student, and Motley had not escaped him at
Harvard; with some of the principal German
sources he had been familiar from his school days
at Joseph Green Cogswell’s Round Hill School.

Deferring to his friend’s taste, Holmes revised
the poem carefully before its first publication in
1862 in Songs in Many Keys.Except for the dele-
tion of matter appropriate only to the original oc-
casion, nearly all the changes were directed by
Motley’s marginal notes and his letter. For this crit-
icism Holmes remained loyally grateful all his life.
In 1889 he wrote to Morley’s daughter Lily: “I be-
lieve your father is the only friend to whom I ever
submitted a manuscript for criticism, though Ed-
ward Everett sent and borrowed one and made
some more or less wise suggestions. But everything
your father said, had meaning for me.”

Introduced by the portion later entitled “The
Old Player” and closing with the section later

entitled “The Secret of the Stars,” this discursive

sentimental poem belongs essentially to the same

genre as Crabbe’s “The Borough,” although in

those places where he allows his wit to rule,

Holmes’s manner is more nearly that of Pope. The

poem deals with five figures—a recluse, a banker,

a lover, a statesman, and a mother—each of whom

cherishes a secret he fears to reveal. What Holmes

called his “simple thread” was not so simple as he

supposed, for the several “secrets” have no very

close relation to one another. Motley, however, ap-

peared to have no difficulty finding his way about

the untitled private printing and was not disturbed

by the juxtaposition of Daniel Webster and the

Virgin Mary.

Of the seven parts of the poem, Motley with-

out hesitation selected as the best the portion now

entitled “The Mother’s Secret.” In his letter he said

of this part: “The pictures are finished with an artis-

tic delicacy of touch & a piety of feeling, which re-

mind me of the Florentine painters of the 14th &

15th centuries.” In the text against the lines de-

scribing the Nativity he wrote: “This is a picture

worthy of Fra Angelico.” In his letter, Motley went

on to speak of sections he did not like: the recog-

nizable portrait of Daniel Webster (“The States-

man’s Secret”), the embezzling banker’s farewell

dinner-party (“The Banker’s Secret”), and the mys-

tery of the recluse of Apple Island (“The Exile’s

Secret”), although for the last of the three he was

willing to make concessions. Motley’s letter pro-

vides the grounds for his preferences:

The Webster photograph is bold, shadowy and

imposing—but would probably elicit more hearty ap-

plause from a public audience, than from some of us

who have perhaps pondered too much the unheroic &

the unpoetical elements which constituted so much

of that golden headed & clay footed image—

The Chambered Nautilus

Had Holmes resisted

this imposition of a

standard alien to his temper

and his talent, he would

have been a wiser and

possibly a better poet than

he was.”