Invictus

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1889

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

“Invictus” invites the reader in, from its dramatic opening line that pulls the reader immediately into the dilemma of the speaker to everything else in the poem. As an example of High Victorian wisdom literature, “Invictus” is designed for clarity of expression and accessibility of form. Henley is not interested in provoking analysis or experimenting with poetic form. The language here is straightforward, inviting. The poet resists elaborate word play or layered symbolism. The goal is instruction. The poem is brief, readable in a single sitting. And, in keeping with this didactic imperative, the poem’s themes are uncomplicated by irony. The diction is direct, even conversational. The poem aims to inspire; like a motivational speaker or a TED video, like a minister in church or a coach at halftime, “Invictus” is designed for mass and immediate consumption, geared to reach (and teach) the widest reach possible.

Hence the form is conventional and accessible. The poem is executed in four blocks: four tidy four-line stanzas, called quatrains. Within each quatrain, the poem maintains a strict (and familiar) rhyme scheme. The best way to offer the poem’s radical message of humanity’s cosmic aloneness is to package that radical message in a poem that looks, scans, and even reads like a conventional poem.

Meter

Meter is the measure each line of poetry follows to create a feeling of rhythm and to control and direct recitation. Like a line of music uses notes to create the system of accents, notes, and pauses, poetry uses beats to create its sonic experience. Given Henley’s conservative sense of prosody, the poem maintains a steady, that is conventional, meter. Each of the 16 lines has eight syllables, broken into two-beat units, called feet. Most often the line maintains an iambic tetrameter pattern. Iambic mimics conversational meter; it uses an unstressed followed by a stressed beat, as in the word “between.” To avoid monotony and to encourage dramatic recitation, the poem plays variations on iambic meter by switching the stresses to stressed-unstressed, called a trochee, as in the word “timber.”

Maintaining that regular meter does more than encourage public recitation and/or make simpler memorization (after all, the poem was designed to gift the middle-class readership with wisdom). The meter suggests that despite the poem’s depiction of the burdens of suffering and the impact of life’s troubles, nothing will cause the speaker to surrender. The meter then suggests the heroic heartbeat of the speaker.

The rhyme scheme enhances that sense of resilient energy. The lines end on clear and ear-friendly rhymes. In the first three stanzas, the poet uses the technique of enjambment, in which one line moves into the next without a mark of stop punctuation. Each stanza ends on a period, which allows the poem regular dramatic pause. The poem, however, much like the speaker, refuses to stop.

Voice

Voice in poetry is a dicey proposition at best. Voice refers to the speaker, and according to the logic of literary devices, that voice is created by diction, syntax, the use (or not) of figurative language, and supremely whatever confessional asides shed light on the emotions and perspectives of the speaker. Setting aside the difficulty of defining a voice in a poem, as if a person might suddenly reveal themselves in, as Henley does, lines that are carefully measured iambic tetrameter and that follow a tight, pre-determined rhyming pattern (ABAB CDCD EFEF GHGH), the poem rejects the concept of a poem revealing or even defining a voice. That would presume Henley is speaking, and that Henley is solely speaking about his amputation and the possibility of a second amputation.

That voice is never heard. Rather, what is heard is the voice of a philosopher, at once immediate and aloof, delivering a truism that speaks to and for all people—no one is in control of what life gives—and distilling from that difficult reality singularly hopeful advice: Never let anyone see the suffering. Bear indignities with grace and courage.

That voice, at once deeply personal and yet serenely impersonal, is the voice of a Poet, capital P, certain that Poetry, capital P, exists not to vent whines but rather to address something called the human condition. That voice speaks in sculpted lines of careful meter and deliberate rhymes, a strategy for making that poem both reader-friendly and, most importantly, unforgettable.