Michael Appelt

What remains ours when life takes control out of our hands?There are poems we admire for their language.There are poems we remember because we learned them at school.And then there are poems that seem to wait for us until life gives us a reason to understand them.

William Ernest Henley’s Invictus belongs to the last category.

The poem is only sixteen lines long, yet its ending has travelled far beyond the world of Victorian poetry:“

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.”

Those words are often quoted as a declaration of confidence and determination. Read by themselves, they can sound almost like a motivational slogan: take control, believe in yourself, overcome whatever stands in your way.

But I think Invictus says something considerably more interesting than that.

That is what I explore in this episode of Musical Poetry, before allowing Henley’s poem to inspire a new piece of music, Still Unbowed.

If you have a few minutes, I would suggest watching the episode above before reading further. Hearing the poem spoken, learning something of the life behind it, and then experiencing its ideas through music gives those famous final lines a rather different weight.

A Poem Born from Circumstances Henley Could Not Control

William Ernest Henley was born in England in 1849.

As a boy, he developed tubercular arthritis. One of his legs was eventually amputated below the knee, and when disease later threatened his remaining leg, he travelled to Edinburgh for treatment by the pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister.

Lister succeeded in saving it.

Henley was only twenty-five when, in 1875, he wrote the poem that would eventually become known as Invictus.

That history matters.

When Henley writes of the “fell clutch of circumstance” and the “bludgeonings of chance”, these are not merely decorative Victorian metaphors. He knew what it meant for circumstance to enter a life without invitation.

He could not simply decide not to be ill.

He could not reverse the loss of his leg.

He could not guarantee what would happen to the other.

And yet from that situation comes:“My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

Perhaps that is the first key to understanding Invictus.

Unbowed does not mean unhurt.

“Invictus” Means Unconquered

There is an intriguing detail about the title itself.

Henley did not originally publish the poem as Invictus. When it appeared in his 1888 collection A Book of Verses, it was untitled.

The Latin title by which we now know it came later.

Invictus means unconquered.

That word is important.

Not untouched.

Not uninjured.

Not someone who wins every battle.

Unconquered.

A person can be hurt and remain unconquered.

A person can lose something and remain unconquered.

A person can be frightened and still refuse to surrender the whole of themselves to fear.

That distinction changes the poem.

Henley Is Not Claiming to Control the Storm

The famous ending tells us:

“I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.”

But look at everything Henley has told us before reaching those lines.

There is night.

There is circumstance.

There is chance.

There are bludgeonings.

There is blood.

There is punishment.

There is the menace of the future and, ultimately, death itself.

None of these things appears to be under the speaker’s control.

So perhaps “master of my fate” cannot simply mean, “I decide what happens to me.

”Henley’s own life would make such a claim rather difficult to sustain.

I hear something subtler.

There may be a territory between what happens to us and what happens within us.

We cannot always choose the illness.

But perhaps we retain some choice about what it makes of us.

We cannot undo disappointment.

But perhaps disappointment does not have to become bitterness.

We cannot prevent every injustice.

But perhaps injustice does not have to teach us cruelty.

We cannot prevent fear from appearing.

But perhaps fear does not have to make every decision.

The Captain Does Not Control the Sea

This is why the final image has become the central visual metaphor of our episode.

A captain does not control the sea.

A captain cannot command the storm to stop.

A captain cannot order the wind to blow from another direction.

Being captain means something different.

Someone is still standing at the wheel.

That is also why, during the musical part of the episode, we leave the Victorian study and move aboard a small fishing boat fighting its way through a rough sea.

The storm does not magically disappear at the end.

That would miss the point.

The question is whether the person at the wheel disappears with it.

From Invictus to Still Unbowed

For the musical adaptation, I chose not simply to sing Henley’s original poem.

You have already heard the original words in the episode.

Instead, Still Unbowed tries to carry Henley’s idea into contemporary language.

One of its lines says:“The hand upon the wheel is mine.

The life within me is my own.”It is not Henley’s language.

But I think it reaches towards the same place.

Not:

I control the world.

Rather:

The world does not get to possess all of me.

That is a much quieter kind of defiance.

And perhaps a more useful one.

Why Invictus Still Matters

Invictus later became famously associated with Nelson Mandela and the extraordinary endurance required during his years of imprisonment.

It is not difficult to understand the attraction.

A prisoner cannot simply choose to open the prison door.

A sick person cannot simply choose not to be sick.

Someone who has suffered a loss cannot decide that it never happened.

Sometimes circumstances really are circumstances.

And perhaps that is why Henley’s poem continues to speak to people more than 150 years after he wrote it.

Because eventually most of us encounter something we cannot negotiate with.

Something we did not choose.

Something that does not ask permission before changing our lives.

At that point, Invictus leaves us with a question.

Not whether we can prevent every night from coming.

But when it does:

Who will be captain?

The storm may not belong to us.

But perhaps the soul still does.