Episode 6: Invictus

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“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” If you’ve never heard these lines spoken before, just hang in there; you will eventually, in movies and speeches, whether in earnest or in parody. W. E. Henley’s “Invictus” is a poem with a message—meant to inspire courage in times of darkness, as it did for Nelson Mandela; or to remind us to keep faith with ourselves, as it did for Winston Churchill. Long before words like “affirmation” or “motivational” were commonplace, before “inspirational” became an industry, William Ernest Henley—who suffered lifelong illness, amputation, poverty, and devastating loss—wrote a poem reminding himself not to give up. Welcome to Rime, where we’re mastering tales from the history of poetry. I’m your host, MJ Millington. 

“Invictus” means unconquerable in Latin; and there were many things in his life that would have conquered a lesser man than William Ernest Henley. He was brilliant, proud, passionate, energetic—Robert Louis Stevenson once said of him, "His presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfolded." He was larger than life; and life didn’t let him off easy. Born in Gloucester, England in 1849, he grew up in poverty and with only intermittent education, thanks to his father’s unsuccessful business ventures. At the age of twelve he was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone, a condition where instead of the tuberculosis bacilli infecting the lungs and causing what was referred to as consumption, they infect the bones and spine, causing severe arthritis as well as necrosis of the bones and spinal discs. For Henley the disease caused lifelong pain and ill-health, of which the amputation of his left leg while he was still in his teens was just the beginning. By the time he wrote “Invictus” in 1875, when he was 26 years old, Henley had spent a total of almost four years in hospitals; places where, in the Victorian era, you were as likely to be killed as cured. Having a limb sawn off, only for tuberculosis to spread to his other leg; undergoing painful surgeries where chunks of his bones were cut away, followed by a convalescence that kept him bed-ridden for almost two years; being fitted for a wooden leg and crutches; the threat of fatal infections like gangrene—Henley suffered all of this while being the sole financial supporter of his widowed mother and four younger siblings; and later on, a wife and child. No wonder daily living might have felt like a fight for his very soul.

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

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.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
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.

Amputation is a difficult and utterly life-changing surgery to undertake today; 150 years ago, when Henley had his leg amputated, the mortality rate for amputations ranged from 25-40% in hospitals, to 70-90% in the army. That means that about half of people who underwent amputation died from it shortly thereafter. Surgeons were valued for speed rather than precision, because if the shock of amputation without anesthesia didn’t kill you, the sepsis or gangrene that followed certainly would. In fact, fatal infection following a stay at the hospital was so prevalent it was referred to as “hospitalism,” and doctors were only at the beginning stages of understanding the need to disinfect their wards, or even wash their hands, let alone their surgical instruments, the patient’s bedsheets, etc. By the early 1870s revolutionary advances in the use of chloroform for anesthesia, thanks to James Simpson; cleanliness in nursing, thanks to Florence Nightingale; and germ theory and disinfection, thanks to Joseph Lister, meant that it was suddenly possible to undergo a precision surgery and survive it with better odds than had ever existed previously. So in 1873 when a stubborn young Henley refused to accept his doctors’ pronouncement that his other leg, where tuberculosis had spread into the foot, would have to come off, he journeyed to Scotland, to Joseph Lister himself at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, to find out if he could save his remaining leg. 

Lister did manage to save the leg. Henley described the operation in a letter to a friend: “There was a long cut across the foot, from ankle to ankle, dividing vessels, tendons and everything, and laying open the affected bone, which in its turn was scooped out ([with] gouge & pliers), so that a large triangular cavity was the result, the apex of which pointed to the toes. This cavity was filled with strips of lint steeped in carbolic oil … the leg itself being bandaged onto a long iron splint ….” This was but the first of two such operations, where Lister literally gouged out hunks of infected bone, using his mainstay carbolic acid as a disinfectant. Recovering from these procedures kept Henley bed-ridden for almost two years.

Henley being Henley, he did not spend that time idly. Though his education had been somewhat scattershot, he had still managed to be accepted to Oxford University in his teens, but was unable to take up his place due to ill-health and lack of funds. Though it’s not really clear that the lack of higher education was any impediment to him, intellectually-speaking. He was profoundly self-directed, and while recovering in the Royal Infirmary he translated the works of Baudelaire into English, and taught himself several other languages. He met the man who would become his best friend, and who would immortalize him in literature. He flirted with the nurses, and ended up marrying the sister of one of his fellow convalescents. And, of course, he wrote poetry.

While “Invictus” is Henley’s best-known poem, the cycle of poems he wrote while at the Royal Infirmary, called In Hospital, is to me his best work. The 28 poems that make up the collection are incredibly modern compared to other Victorian poetry; we’d have no trouble reading and relating to them today, both in the bare honesty of his experience and well as the simple and powerful style he used to convey those experiences. The poems take the reader through the whole cycle of Henley’s time in hospital, from the first poem, “Enter Patient,” all the way through to the last, “Discharged.” Here is the poem called “Operation,” which I strongly suspect might be the first poem in English about undergoing anaesthesia. As an interesting aside, the doctor who coined the use of the words “anaesthesia” and “anaesthetic” was Oliver Wendell Holmes, a famous 19th century poet as well as physician.

Operation by William Ernest Henley

You are carried in a basket,
Like a carcase from the shambles,
To the theatre, a cockpit
Where they stretch you on a table.

Then they bid you close your eyelids,
And they mask you with a napkin,
And the anæsthetic reaches
Hot and subtle through your being.

And you gasp and reel and shudder
In a rushing, swaying rapture,
While the voices at your elbow
Fade — receding — fainter — farther.

Lights about you shower and tumble,
And your blood seems crystallising —
Edged and vibrant, yet within you
Racked and hurried back and forward.

Then the lights grow fast and furious,
And you hear a noise of waters,
And you wrestle, blind and dizzy,
In an agony of effort,

Till a sudden lull accepts you,
And you sound an utter darkness . . .
And awaken . . . with a struggle . . .
On a hushed, attentive audience.

The intimacy of the poem is so different from the declamatory tone of “Invictus,” and different again from the bulk of the poetry Henley wrote throughout his life—overly flowery, not terrible but not stupendous. Nothing like the moving, bare beauty of the In Hospital poems. They deserve wider recognition, and I hope to dedicate an episode to them, and the Victorian medical system, in the future. Henley wrote about the nurses; the wards; Dr. Lister himself; the things he could hear going on in the street outside his window, but couldn’t always see; and other patients, like the two little boys he shared a room with for a while, Roden and Willie, who liked to play surgeon and patient. “See them play / At operations,” he wrote, “Roden, the Professor, / Saws, lectures, takes the artery up, and ties; / Willie, self-chloroformed, with half-shut eyes, / Holding the limb and moaning …” 

Roden and Willie were there playing dominoes in the background when Henley’s editor brought a friend to visit in February 1875. Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf, was then the editor of The Cornhill Magazine, and was publishing some of Henley’s hospital poems. He was up in Edinburgh, and decided to bring a local friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, to visit Henley. The pair hit it off immediately. Stevenson was the one to pick Henley up the day of his final discharge from the Royal Infirmary, and brought him to live at his place in Edinburgh. The duo wrote four plays together, though none were commercially successful. Perhaps more importantly, Stevenson immortalized his friend in the form of Long John Silver, the cunning wooden-legged pirate captain in his novel Treasure Island. Henley was tall and powerfully built, vigorous on his wooden leg despite his amputation and surgeries. After Treasure Island’s publication Stevenson wrote to Henley, “It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver.” 

But even as Henley’s peg-legged avatar went on to immortality on the page, Henley struggled to find acceptance for his own writing. Despite Leslie Stephen taking a chance on some of his poems for Cornhill, the hospital poems were proving too unforgivably real for the Victorians. His manuscript was rejected everywhere he sent it, with comments returned to him like “crude,” or “grotesque,” or that the poems had inspired a “shudder of revolt.” Dispirited and desperately in need of paying work, Henley set poetry aside, and became an editor himself. He married Hannah Boyle, whom he had met while she was visiting her brother at the Royal Infirmary, and in 1888 they had a daughter, Margaret Emma, who became the light of Henley’s life. Her child’s way of pronouncing the word “Friendy”—her name for family friend J. M. Barrie—as “Fwendy” was the inspiration for Barrie choosing the name Wendy for the heroine of Peter Pan. But Margaret Emma was struck with cerebral meningitis in February 1894, and died at the age of five. Henley was devastated; and though he soldiered on, even finding acclaim in poetry and his critical writings, he never really recovered from his daughter’s death. His last years were fraught with increasing ill-health and pain, financial worries between editorships, and more surgeries. He was big and boisterous, passionate and dramatic in his conversation, laughing loudly and expressing his opinions with vehemence. Oscar Wilde wrote of him, “To converse with him is a physical no less than an intellectual recreation,” and W. B. Yeats wrote, “I disagreed with him about everything, but I admired him beyond words.” But the pain and ill-health that he was never free from caused him to grow more quarrelsome as the years passed, and he had a bitter falling-out with his closest friend, Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1902 a fall from a railway carriage re-awoke the latent tuberculosis in his system; he died in July 1903, at the age of 53, and his ashes were interred in the grave of his beloved daughter.

Henley’s legacy lived on, however, in the form of a poem whose fame and importance only grew in the years after his death. It was included in the landmark Oxford Book of English Verse, an anthology published in 1900. It’s here that the poem finally received the title we know it by today: it had been untitled, and often referred to by its first line, “Out of the night,” until the editor of the anthology, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, inspired by the phrase “my unconquerable soul,” named it “Invictus.” The anthology was hugely successful and important in popular culture for generations to come; it was carried by troops into the trenches of World War I, and with missionaries, teachers and administrators into every office and classroom of the British Empire. It’s how so many disparate people throughout the world came to know, and be inspired by, one poem in particular.

At first glance, “Invictus” shares what a lot of “inspirational” poems seem to have going on—a tone of authoritative proclamation that puts a distance between what the poet is saying, and what they might have really felt about the events that occasioned the poem. “In the fell clutch of circumstance, / I have not winced nor cried aloud. / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.” None of that is very specific—Henley doesn’t say here what the fell circumstances or bludgeonings of chance were, unlike in his In Hospital poems. It’s the sort of poem that wants you to learn from its experience, without ever really revealing that experience. “Invictus” does not seem like an intimate poem at first glance; if you didn’t know about his life you could be forgiven for thinking that Henley simply wrote something motivational because it was the thing to do. The poem is almost always referred to as being an exemplar of Victorian stoicism, alongside Kipling’s famous poem “If-”, which begins, “If you can keep your head when all about you / ⁠Are losing theirs and blaming it on you ...” and ends—somewhat disappointingly, for this reader anyway—“you'll be a Man, my son!” Chin up, cheerio, and all that stiff-upper-lip twaddle that, if we insist on that association, comes close to negating the fact that Henley knew what he was talking about. As he wrote to his publisher, Alfred Nutt, "All human art has its basis in life and experience, and the closer the connection the greater the result.” He suffered through it, he lived to tell the tale, he wrote a poem about it. And unlike Kipling, he’s not excluding anyone (i.e., women) from being able to embrace the message of the poem. There’s something about “Invictus” that invites the reader inside the poem, to read their own circumstances and struggles into its words, to take its message of courage deep within. 

Winston Churchill used lines from “Invictus” in his speeches; Nelson Mandela recited it to his fellow political prisoners in Robben Island. Oscar Wilde, C. S. Lewis and W. E. B. Du Bois have all used its lines in their own writing. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” has been heard in countless movies, including Casablanca. Thanks to an image search on the internet, I now know that people have tattooed Henley’s words into their very flesh. It should come as no surprise. The man himself was unconquerable; why shouldn’t his words be as well? As T. E. Brown, Manx poet and Henley’s beloved childhood tutor, wrote to him when he was still struggling, fresh out of the Royal Infirmary, “Your pluck and vigor under such circumstances utterly amaze me. But you have hope as a passion more than most men: and I do think that a passion so strong is as good as a prophecy. You will get all right. I can't doubt it.” And neither should we doubt ourselves, as “Invictus” shows us, when the black night tries to cover us. Though we might be bloodied, may we all remain unbowed. 

Rime is written, produced and hosted by me, MJ Millington. The theme song is “Wizard of the Stars,” by Phillip Traum and the Moral Sense. Thanks for listening! Make sure to visit the Rime website at rimepodcast.com, that’s R_I_M_E podcast.com, where you’ll find complete shownotes for this and every episode. You’ll also find links to my own poetry and visual art, so check it out. And if you enjoy Rime, please leave us a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts. Those ratings really help potential listeners find the great stories we’re telling here. Until next time!

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Sources

Boehmer, Elleke. Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2008. 

Cohen, Edward H. “Henley's ‘In Hospital’, Literary Realism, and the Late-Victorian Periodical Press.” Victorian Periodicals Review , Spring, 1995, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pp. 1-10.
www.jstor.org/stable/20082817

Cohen, Edward H. “The Second Series of W. E. Henley’s Hospital Poems.” The Yale University Library Gazette, vol. 78, no. 3/4 (2004), pp. 128–150.
www.jstor.org/stable/40859569

Cohen, Edward H. “Two Anticipations of Henley's ‘Invictus’.” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Feb. 1974), pp. 191-196.
www.jstor.org/stable/3817033

Daniels, Eddie. There And Back: Robben Island, 1964-1979. Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye Books, 1998.

Diniejko, Andrzej. “William Ernest Henley: A Biographical Sketch.” Victorian Web. 19 July 2011.
www.victorianweb.org/authors/henley/introduction.html

Goldman, Martin. Lister Ward. Bristol, Boston: Adam Hilger, 1987.
archive.org/details/listerward0000unse

Harwood, Gwen. “‘I am the Captain of My Soul’.” Poems. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963.

Henley, William Ernest. A Book of Verses. New York : Scribner & Welford, 1889. 2nd ed.
Find it here: catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100544946

Henley, William Ernest. In Hospital. Portland, Maine: Thomas B. Mosher, 1908.
Find it here: archive.org/details/inhospital00henl/mode/2up
Or find the poems here: www.victorianweb.org/authors/henley/inhospital/contents.html

Keller, Julia. “McVeigh and ‘Invictus’: a murderer’s last words.” Chicago Tribune. 20 April 2001.
www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-04-20-0104200003-story.html

McCooey, David. "Poetry, Terrorism, and the Uncanny: “Timothy McVeigh’s ‘Invictus’”." Criticism, vol. 54 no. 4, 2012, p. 485-505.
muse.jhu.edu/article/490687

Mehew, Ernest. "Henley, William Ernest (1849–1903), writer." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  May 25, 2006. Oxford University Press.
www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-33817