I am the master of my fate: I am the…

The two lines end a poem of four stanzas. It opens in a night “Black as the Pit from pole to pole”, with thanks to “whatever gods may be” for an “unconquerable soul”. In “the fell clutch of circumstance” the speaker has not winced nor cried aloud; under “the bludgeonings of chance” his head is “bloody, but unbowed”. The last stanza sets the strait gate and the scroll “charged with punishments” against this declaration, and the text is dated 1875.

Henley had lost his left leg below the knee to tuberculosis of the bone as a young man. In 1873 he went to Edinburgh, where the surgeon Joseph Lister saved his other foot, and he wrote the poem there, in hospital. It appeared untitled in A Book of Verses (1888); the name Invictus, Latin for “unconquered”, was given to it by Arthur Quiller-Couch in the Oxford Book of English Verse (1900).

Nelson Mandela is said to have recited it to fellow prisoners on Robben Island, and it gave its title to the 2009 film about him.

Invictus, last lines; written in 1875, first published untitled in A Book of Verses (1888), 1888

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