'That Is My Ambition Here'

Does anyone still read “Invictus”? Is it part of any school’s curriculum? It was as late as 1965, when Miss Wagy had us memorize it in eighth-grade English. The poem is irresistible for recitation, whether privately in times of self-doubt or at the Kiwanis luncheon: “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.” Its defiant stance is rousing, which makes sense when you know that the poem’s author, William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), was diagnosed with tubercular arthritis at age twelve and his left leg was amputated below the knee. Henley’s friend Robert Louis Stevenson admitted his one-legged character Long John Silver in Treasure Island was inspired by Henley. 

A first-time reader of “Invictus” might mistake it for a string of clichés. This is a common phenomenon among inexperienced readers. They read, for instance, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” encounter “The short and simple annals of the poor” and “The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” and conclude that Gray has strung together a bunch of tired adages we’ve already heard. In fact, Gray was the first to craft those memorable phrases. In a 1976 interview with The Transatlantic Review, the Irish novelist and short story writer William Trevor is asked about his characters’ use of clichés, and he replies:

 

“Clichés, after all, are a reflection of life. They are like fashion: not untrue in any way. They are facts and yet somebody will read one and say ‘Well, this is just a cliché.’ It’s not just a cliché. . . . It’s a cliché world we live in now.”

 

Consider the poetry anthology Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys Henley edited in 1891. “To set forth,” Henley writes in his preface, “as only art can, the beauty and the joy of living, the beauty and the blessedness of death, the glory of battle and adventure, the nobility of devotion—to a cause, an ideal, a passion even—the dignity of resistance, the sacred quality of patriotism, that is my ambition here.”

 

I encountered five poets previously unknown to me, which is always a gift. Henley values not obscurity or exoticism but good, solid, pre-Modernist poems he judges important for boys to read – not afraid to be beautiful, joyous, patriotic – all the qualities identified by Henley in his preface. He’s not, like so many anthologists, out to collect the outré, regardless of quality. There’s plenty of verse here that is unreadable. But even some of the dated stuff bordering even in its own day on cliché is worth revisiting. Take “Is Life Worth Living?” (also the title of an 1896 volume by William James) written by Alfred Austin (1835-1913), which concludes: “He is dead already who doth not feel / Life is worth living still.”

 

Henley was born on this date, August 23, in 1849 and died in 1903 at age fifty-three.