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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Night
The poet begins (and stays) immersed in the night. Night symbolizes all of the trials, troubles, and challenges of life. By not particularizing what both challenges and terrifies the speaker, night becomes applicable to every person. The night represents that absolute condition of helplessness and vulnerability.
In the poem, night is total, “black as the pit from pole to pole” (Line 2). The poet borrows from scripture to suggest that there is about this condition of helplessness the feeling of Hell itself, the pit, Hell at its deepest and most forbidding. The poem risks hyperbole. But because the poem does not develop specifics, the poem uses night to convey not the reality of life’s challenges, terrors, and anxieties but rather how life can feel at times. In turn, the night, because it lacks illumination, associated with insight and wisdom, captures the poet’s feeling of confusion and alarm over how or why these conditions have happened, an element that makes all that much keener the suffering the speaker endures.
Ship’s Captain
In asserting the irrelevancy of the traditional notion of God as operating manager of the cosmos, the poem asserts rather that the individual is operating manager not of the cosmos—that concept is too wide and too forbidding to allow the fantasy of some agency in control of it—but rather in absolute control of how the individual responds to conditions beyond their control or even their understanding. In using the symbol of the captain of a ship, the poem inspires a culture that was reliant on maritime industry to keep the world operating.
A captain of a ship was no metaphor for the British in the late 19th century. At the height of the Victorian Era, Britain commanded an international empire that relied on its navy and its merchant marine vessels to maintain power and control. The captain of a ship was invested with the security of the ship itself. The captain was a powerful symbol of quiet stoicism, the refusal to panic whatever the circumstances. In navigating the open waters of the ocean, the captain, much like the speaker, persevered, adjusted to conditions, and never caved in to the pull of panic. Tight-lipped, keen-eyed, the captain symbolizes the highest achievement of a person cast into an unpredictable and tricky universe freed of the sponsorship of a loving and all-knowing God. Despair is not an option, abandoning the ship unthinkable. Maintain the course, the poem argues, using the captain as symbol of the courage of Henley’s heroic individual.
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis was among the most feared diseases in Victorian England. “Invictus” is a poem about handling what was at the time a formidable, even terrifying medical reality. Henley had already lost a leg to the infection and, only in his twenties, faced the possibility of losing his other leg. The protocols he endured were painful and rigorous. Although Henley avoids anchoring “Invictus” to his particular circumstances and thus allows the poem to speak to a variety of emotionally-charged moments, the poem uses tuberculosis (although the word does not appear in the poem) as a symbol of a special emotional terror: the body betraying itself. The poem asks, how does a person handle it when the body itself is the enemy? The poem then uses tuberculosis to symbolize that helplessness when circumstances are not pressed onto a person from the outside but rather come from the inside.
Like the bubonic plague or malaria, like polio or COVID-19, indeed like cancer or Alzheimer’s, tuberculosis for the 19th-century culture was a scary reality, an enemy from within triggered by the furious and unpredictable activity of bacteria, one cell after another surrendering, destroying the body that keeps them alive. Within the perception of Christianity, tuberculosis, or any terminal diseases for that matter, was a way for the Creator God to summon the pilgrim soul home. Absent that, tuberculosis becomes a symbol for speaker of an absolute, a dark confrontation with the limits of control and how completely helpless a person might feel once the pain and indignities of long-term illness become an everyday reality. In this, tuberculosis symbolizes helplessness, when the antagonist is nothing less than the body itself.
