Invictus William Ernest Henley 1849 – 1902
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
This poem is either the most laughable of self-parodized individualism —
akin to the self-retrospection of Robert Browning's better-known and critically
acclaimed monologues, or the most lamentable of self-congratulatory paeans, like
the insufferable racist rants of Rudyard Kipling.
This populist piece does not touch the hems of "doggerel"
cunning, yet nor can any critic with any interest in taste, triumph, or truth,
appraise so a base and pagan a gesture in league with "The Stuffed
Owl" of Wordsworth or the common staples of good-bad poetry by Edna
Wilcox.
The meandering contradictions of "Invictus" begin with the title,
an allusion to the popular deity which fused with Christ Jesus at the turn of
the Roman Empire from rowdy to religion under Emperor Constantine, a faux
believer who capitalized on the growing sentiment of the God-man faith to
enhance is man-God allure.
"Out of the night that covers me" sounds almost like the first
line of a rough draft, or the final submission of an elementary student
entering the local "Reflections" contest. The poet's casual ease with
capital leaders merely capitalizes on the speaker's captious self-regard,
though the essential "blackness" of the "Pit" is never
fully explained.
He address whatever gods may be, yet the "god" that has most
captivated this man is his own soul, an egotism mimed in the most basic rhyme
and meter. The illogic of so trite a construction of "unconquerable
soul" No man can speak of a soul without also indicating by inference a
Creator far greater than himself. Yet this creator is swallowed up and removed
without reference beyond the empty plural of "gods", which betrays
the speaker's intellectual and spiritual myopia, for as Montaigne gently chided
in his more poetic and impressive "Essays", man cannot make a flea,
but he fabricates gods by the dozens. Such is the silly sentiments of this
"invincible" "I", who is not even captain of his improper
and impertinent use of the English language or basic theology.
Someone must take this speaker aside and read to him, "For what is a man
profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what
shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
(Matthew 16: 26)
The poet bothered to write "black" and "pit" wit large
headed letters, but the forces which force themselves against him so violently,
he disregards in vagaries. "Circumstance" and "chance" suit
each other well enough, yet how can such ephemeral forces so force themselves
on a man, with his head "bloody" yet "unbowed."? Nothing in
the first or second stanzas would suggest anything beyond his own heady
rhetoric that has led him to blows, a boxing match of shadows, to say the
least.
In the third stanza, the speaker confronts "the Horror of the
shade", once again capitalizing an ephemeral menace, as he did when he
describe the "Black Pit." For a man who claims to be
"unafraid," why does he so obliquely personify the negative elements
which face him?
The "shade" he refers to as a "Horror", but a man
instilled with courage has no reason, no sentiment of betraying even a tinge of
terror would surface. This man, boasting in his proud courage, is facing off
against shapeless spirits — a pitiful match, indeed.
He has boasted that he can best the worst elements, traces of a challenge
which can manifest no real threat except in the mind of a man who has made
himself everything. "I am the master of my fate," he crows, but to
appreciate the full import of "fate", one must acknowledge a higher
order, a greater power, or a narrative in which a single person plays but a
part, and a small one at that. Even in declaring himself "King of the
mountain", or "captain of my soul", he has merely betrayed his
frayed and splayed weakness in a world of vain imaginations, where he only has
horribly pitted himself against "Horrors" and pits. Even the subtle
references "strait the gate" attaches to a cultural legacy beyond
this man's confines and comprehension. Not only is this man neither captain nor
master, he is a petty creature raging against the cage of his own flimsy and clichéd
adages.
On a side note, domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh invoked this poem on the
day of his execution, exposing the weakness of individualist arrogance, a
weakness borne out the way a cancer patient coughs out that he is recovering,
only to succumb the disease. He
destroyed the Oklahoma City branch of the Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms,
decimating a federal building, yet killing many and harming many more
innocents, McVeigh’s flagrant act of cowardice was rewarded with the snuffing
out of his empty, weakened life. His last stand of defiance, like building a
sandbar against a tsunami, was the poem “Invictus”, for a soulless man who
falsely equated violent evil with the invincibility of his soul.