Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Pens the Final Stanza of “Sun and Shadow”, an Ode to the Boat and Sea

In 1847, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a physician, was appointed Professor of Anatomy at Harvard, a position he retained for thirty-five years. He was also an author who had for years been contributing poems, songs, essays and sketches to various newspapers and periodicals. His literary career first blossomed, however, when the Atlantic Monthly was established in 1857 with his friend James Russell Lowell as editor. In its columns Holmes’s “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” began to appear, starting in the first number and running in serial form throughout the entire first year of the journal’s existence. Rarely if ever have magazine articles attained such popularity. The keen psychological insights, the depth of human sympathy displayed in them, the genial humor and the sparkling wit, the spontaneity of the pathos and the lofty scorn of wrong and injustice, brought him immediate renown.

Holmes, like the Romantics, revered nature, especially in the surrounding areas where he lived. It was a beautiful, semi-rural setting which he often wrote about, sometimes concentrating on the flora and fauna, as in his playful “To an Insect”, and sometimes creating from nature a metaphor for life, as in “The Two Streams”. His father, the Reverend Abiel Holmes, was a considerable scholar and a pastor of the local church, and Holmes grew up in an environment that mixed the academic with rusticity. Many of his poems, such as “The Wasp and the Hornet”, have the zest and salt-tang of the sea, or the vivid detail of life on board ship, as in “The Sun and Shadow”.

Autograph quotation signed, March 28, 1860, Boston, the concluding stanza of “Sun and Shadow”.

Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves
Where life and its ventures are laid,
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves
May see us in sunshine or shade;
Yet true to our course, though the shadows grow dark,
We’ll trim our broad sail as before,
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the shore!