INVICTUS

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.

Vocabulary
1. pit (n)

- a large hole in the ground

2. fell (adj)

- very fierce or cruel

3. clutch (adj)

- a very important or critical time

4. wince (v)

- to have an expression of embarrassment or

pain
5. bludgeonings (n)

- something used to attack

6. unbowed (adj)

- not having submitted to pressure or demands

- not defeated or willing to admit defeat

7. loom (v)

- to appear in a large, strange, or frightening

form
often in a sudden way
- to appear in an impressively large or great form
8. menace (n)

- a dangerous or threatening quality

9. strait (adj; arch)

- narrow

ABOUT the Author

William Ernest Henley, (born Aug. 23, 1849, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, Eng.died July 11, 1903, Woking, near London), British poet, critic, and
editor who in his journals introduced the early work of many of the great English writers of the 1890s.
Son of a Gloucester bookseller and a pupil of the poet T.E. Brown, Henley contracted a tubercular disease that later necessitated the amputation of
one foot. His other leg was saved only through the skill and radical new methods of the surgeon Joseph Lister, whom he sought out in Edinburgh. Forced to stay
in an infirmary in Edinburgh for 20 months (187375), he began writing impressionistic poems (some in free verse) about hospital life that established his poetic
reputation. Some of these were published in The Cornhill Magazine in 1875; the whole sequence appeared in A Book of Verses (1888). Dating from the same
period is his most popular poem, Invictus (1875), which concludes with the lines I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul. Subsequent
volumes of verse include London Voluntaries (1893), Poems (1898), Hawthorn and Lavender (1899), and For Englands Sake (1900).
Henleys long, close friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson began in 1874 when he was still a patient, and Stevenson based part of the character of
Long John Silver in Treasure Island on his crippled, hearty friend.
Restored to active life, Henley edited The Magazine of Art (188286), in which he championed the artists James McNeill Whistler and Auguste Rodin,
and worked on the Encyclopdia Britannica. He became editor of the Scots Observer of Edinburgh in 1889. The journal was transferred to London in 1891 and
became the National Observer. Though conservative in its political outlook, it was liberal in its literary taste and published the work of Thomas Hardy, George
Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, James Barrie, William Butler Yeats, and Rudyard Kipling. As an editor and critic, Henley was remembered by young writers as a
benevolent bully, generous in his promotion and encouragement of unknown talents and fierce in his attacks on unmerited reputations. The hearty, realist, and
imperialist writers particularly associated with Henley in the 1890ssometimes known as the Henley regattawere seen as an alternative to the Decadent writers of the period.