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.
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.
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