Life is like a book. Within these books a person’s story goes through trials of finding themselves, seeking answers, and going through wrong paths. Life is a book full of lessons that one applies from one stage to the next. A person applies one lesson from their past to new experience. Young Goodman Brown represents the struggle of life and how a person can lose sight of themselves in the journey of life. The Chambered Nautilus represents the positive that the struggles that a person goes through the past will help them learn and grow.
Life struggles and success are from out past mistakes are from learning from them. The Chambered Nautilus represented how nature closed the past and continue to the future, while Young Goodman Brown uses nature to represent being stuck in the past. The Chambered Nautilus represents the growth of a person from one point in life to the next, and Holmes uses nature to interpret the positivity from moving forward from the past. In stanza one of The Chambered Nautilus, Holmes represents the past as the Nautilus and the person moving on as the mollusk.
Holmes wrote, “This is the ship of pearl, which poets feign”, he explains that the person is the ship of pearl who will grow from the past. Holmes relates stanza two with stanza one by using the ship to the animal who moved on. Similarly to modern times, a person leaves one part of their lives to move to the next part. The nature aspects inside the Chambered Nautilus are used to visualize that the past can help a person grow in the future. Stanza three of The Chambered Nautilus speaks about growth and moving one part of the shell to the next.
This uses the symbolism of nature to relate it from moving on from the past. The nautilus moves from one chamber to a bigger chamber to grow. A person will move from one part of their life, and the person will leave that one part of their life behind and continue to move forward. Like a child moving from middle school to high school, they will carry the lessons they learned in middle school and apply them to high school. The last stanza ties all expects of growth.
Growth can be done when a person moves on from the past, and even though they cannot return to the past they are able to look back. Young Goodman Brown represents a person being stuck in the past which sets them back to fall into the same mistake. Goodman Brown gets drawn into the forest even though his wife, Faith tells him not to go. Brown represents man and nature represent mistakes or sin. His curiosity will lure him further in the forest and to sin and away from innocence. Brown will be so deep into sin he fails to move on from his past.
This was seen when he notices an older traveler who resembled him. It is Goodman Brown from the future repeating the past. Not only does Brown repeat sin he also goes through internal sin as journey forth in the forest. Although Faith warned him not to go, he persisted in continuing his mission. Brown also realizes that the path he is taking is sinful and tries to take a break, but he can not break the cycle of sin. His efforts of breaking away from sin can’t mask the effects of sin that will follow him and taint him forever.
Both texts reflect on the different spectrum of life. They show two different sides of modern attitudes, putting the past into perspective and staying in the past, as well as, the spirit of an individual. The Chambered Nautilus reflects on putting the past into perspective. The nautilus represents the different stages of life. Holmes uses this aspect of nature of moving on from the past. Throughout the poem, Holmes represent the mollusk that lives in the shell as people. People will continue to grow older and wiser. He uses the shell as life and the moving from the past.
As the mollusk moves from the different chambers of the shell it will inevitably close them. In perspective of modern attitudes, people will close one part of their life and move on to the next part of life after they have gained what they needed from that part of life. Today’s society many look on their past to help them grow Young Goodman Brown shows a different aspect of nature. Hawthorne uses the forest in a dark sense, while Holmes used nature as a positive. Brown goes through the difficulty of moving on and letting the past go. Modern society is Goodman Brown.
People tend to be stuck in their past and can’t release themselves from it. Brown faced the struggle of leaving his mistakes and dwells inside the forest. The forest keeps Brown from moving forward. However, Romantic philosophy is not allows accepted in modern attitudes. In modern attitudes and perspectives tend to focus on reasons over emotions, while Romantic philosophy is about emotions over reason. In its philosophy, Romanticism texts speak about how people should put their emotions over reasoning because it is a supplement to reason.
Without emotions, a person can not use reasons to rationalize a problem. In modern attitudes reasoning is over personal emotions. The reasoning is the foundation of a person’s thought and they push aside their emotions this is because society tends to focus on the right answers and not on how a person is feeling. Everyone wants to learn and grow from their past, and hope they don’t repeat their mistakes. Like a book, people can end one part of their life and move on to the next chapter, but with the struggles of letting go.
