Invictus

There is a paradox at the heart of “Invictus”—the poet is without hope, helpless and discouraged. And yet the poet also feels empowered and encouraged. This resilience, the poem suggests, is a particularly human virtue that resists logic. After all, the conditions that provoke it, uncertainty and vulnerability, should not in turn produce strength and courage. And yet as Henley records in the opening stanza, only the feeling of utter hopelessness can generate the sustaining energy of resilience. Resilience is thus created by the very conditions it conquers.

The poem begins in misery, offering no moments from the threat of despair. Neither does the poem offer narrative context. Unspecified conditions have gutted the speaker’s heart. He is alone, and his soul—the Christian God—has become a vague presence of “gods” (Line 3). The speaker is left only with the feeling of imminent surrender. In using the metaphor of the night, the poem suggests how immersed the speaker feels within these circumstances. In a world still five years away from the invention of the light bulb, night represents a pressing and sinister darkness, the night-world absent illumination.

And yet the speaker celebrates the awareness of absolute darkness; it alone makes manifest his “unconquerable soul” (Line 4). In recognizing the magnitude of this “fell clutch of circumstance” (Line 5), that is, the evil grip of misfortune, the speaker asserts the first stirring of resilience, the determination not to give in to the evidence of helplessness and the simple logic of discouragement. Despair, the poet understands, is far easier than hope. In suggesting his will is “bloodied, but unbowed” (Line 8), the poem offers a vivid image that indicates the pain of circumstances cuts deeply as if with a weapon. The poem argues that emotional pain is just as visceral, just as immediate, and just as consequential as physical pain.

It would be at this point, the darkest moment in the poem, when typically the individual so crossed by misfortune, bad luck, and foreseeable events would invoke the guidance and reassurance of God or turn to any number of endgame escapes: alcohol, drugs, suicide. In Stanza 3, the poet acknowledges that the pleasant draw of the afterlife as a strategy for making tolerable life’s vicissitudes, however, does not convince. Beyond this life, this “place of wrath and tears” (Line 9), is only death, the “Horror of the shade” (Line 10)—the capitalization underscores the speaker’s awareness of the forbidding absoluteness of mortality.

The poem argues that one should endure the difficulties life presents: The reward for this endurance is death. Given that choice, a life of suffering closing in the final irony of death, the speaker refuses to indulge what he imagines is the temporary calm of religion. The speaker rises to the challenge of enduring the suffering without fear, without apology, and without others. There is a sublime, heroic egotism to Henley’s argument—suggested by the abundance of first-person pronouns. The speaker cannot find justification for faith in God to right wrongs, nor can the speaker find comfort in the possibility of help or support from others. Even within that chilling reality, the “menace of the years” (Line 11), the speaker taps a resilient calm: The speaker is “unafraid” (Line 12).

Had the poem ended there, however, the assertion of confidence might seem too easy, too glib. After all, the logic of Stanza 3 actually confounds logic: The speaker understands his hopelessness and yet hopes. The poem needs some explanation for where such resilience comes. No matter what life compels the poet to endure, no matter how “charged with punishments” is the testament of that life, the speaker’s “scroll” (Line 14), the poet endures. The entire poem hinges on a single unspoken rhetorical question—Why?

The answer is as simple as it is defiant, as clear as it is mysterious. The speaker cannot be defeated, the poem argues, because the speaker alone is in control of his response to life. The poet acknowledges that actually fixing life is a chimera. Within a deterministic vision that suggests heroism comes from the ability to respond rather than change conditions, Henley, himself fighting for more than two decades an insidious bacterial infection that had cost him a leg and put him through excruciating medical protocols, asserts in the closing two lines, a couplet that has become the rallying cry for the post-Christian era: I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. In this the poem dismisses the idea that fate and character are entangled. Over there, the speaker says, are the circumstances of life. Over here, I am untouched, untouchable. They are separate. It is a tempered optimism, as there is no escaping the circumstances and death is inevitable. The poet nevertheless celebrates the resilience of the unconquerable spirit that makes epic each individual life.