19 pages • 38 minutes read
William Ernest HenleyInvictus
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1889A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Triumph of the Human Spirit
“Invictus” celebrates something called the human spirit, a radical concept for Henley’s staid Victorian readership. It is a philosophical concept summarized in the word “yet.” “Yet” was something of a rare concept in 19th-century England. After all, within the established Christian vision, a person rose—or fell—only to offer gratitude to the Divine Creator. The soul was a gift from that same God and, whatever events defined life, it was destined for immortality, at once a part of and apart from each person.
Within the complex vision of the emerging sciences, any individual human—whatever the circumstances of their life—scraped to survive only because a species refuses to accept as logical its own extinction. For Henley, there was something else, something immeasurable, something not a gift but a something each person is born with, a something that demonstrates stoic endurance when tested by the most difficult circumstances, a something that is grander, larger, and more heroic than animal survival. The poem offers a view of the world that is pessimistic, a world “black as the pit from pole to pole” (Line 2), a world where much happens to people that people cannot control.
Yet—there is the word—yet individuals refuse to surrender to the suffering, refuse to bend, not because of the longshot premise of some vague, mythic afterlife, not because of some stubborn species need for persistence, but because that test brings out a person’s individual spirit. Spirit is something impossible to quantify, impossible to detect, impossible to define. Like a Christian soul, like an animal’s survival, however, the spirit is essential to who and what each person is. Spirit is as much spiritual and physical. In relying on our own devices, our own courage, that spirit is nothing less than the determination to make the most of whatever life we are given.
The Relevance of God
“Invictus” both invokes and questions the presence and authority of the Christian God. Although the opening two lines of “Invictus” feel like a prayer, a conventional Christian supplication to God to guide the faithful through the valley of tears that is this earthly pilgrimage, that religious feeling is halted in Line 3 when the speaker acknowledges the debt to not God but gods for the strength of his spirit—his “own unconquerable soul” (Line 4)—to endure the challenges life will pose rather than relying on some soul on temporary loan from some distant Creator-God.
Henley, writing at the height of the Victorian Era, hesitated to abandon entirely the relevance of God. Science, however, had begun to suggest the Christian cosmos might be better appreciated as a universe whose intricate clockwork was the work not of some benevolent Creator-God but rather the stunning working-out of eons of physical laws. But the argument of the poem celebrates the very human spirit to endure despite of not because of God’s presence.
What is missing here is the familiar Christian imperative of humility in the face of the day-to-day trials of life. Within a religion that dismisses pride as a heretical assertion that displaces God from the center of the cosmos, Henley’s acknowledgement that each individual is the master of their fate and that each individual captains their spirit, their soul, smacks of bald heresy. It insinuates at best a limit to God, and at worst the impotency of God. “Invictus” positions the individual at the moral and spiritual center of the universe—If God is not outright denied, God is rendered an irrelevancy. Furthermore, the traditional inspiration for God—the coaxing lure of an afterlife, whether a person is destined for heaven or hell, endows even the meanest moments, the darkest tribulations with purpose—is here dismissed out of hand. No heaven, no hell, the poem argues, only the absolute “Horror” of the “shade” (Line 10), a nothingness that a half-century later existential philosophers will offer as the “nada.”
The Role of the Poet
“Invictus” speaks to the concept of the role of the poet in society all but lost today. In the present era, the most celebrated poets exist in the margins of cultural relevance, whereas in Henley’s era, the poet was perceived to hold an invaluable centering social and cultural position. Although the contemporary perception of poets sees their function to explore the assorted emotional lacerations, the joys and sorrows, agonies and ironies of the poet’s own life, Henley’s era regarded poets as intrinsic to the cultural health of a nation. Poets, presumed repositories of insight, were entrusted with the responsibility to offer wisdom and insights into strategies for better living directed by moral choices.
The poem therefore underscores that the role of the poet is to help direct and correct behavior, to inspire and motivate right living. The poem itself offers no hint that the poet is himself a 20-something patient experiencing the terrifying reality of tuberculosis. Henley himself is not so much a person as a public functionary, a holder of the public trust to distill from such experiences the insight of the poet’s judgment to offer a strategy for better living. The Poet (and the capital letter is irresistible, really implied) deals in grand concepts such as spiritual resilience, courage in the face of suffering, and the immeasurable strength of the human will.
As a Poet, Henley fashions the kind of verses that would lend themselves as much to whispered recitation, like an old-school prayer, as to public declamation, a poem tailored for public occasions in which the will of a people must be engaged. Henley perceived the poet as spokesperson for the very best thoughts of the British educated middle class, using the vehicle of poetry to express for them the best ideas that best reflected their cultural and social place. The Poet, in turn, created a reassuring sense of community in expressing their highest ideals, in the case of “Invictus,” the courage to face iniquities with courage, stoicism, and discipline.
