IV
I.M.
R. T. HAMILTON BRUCE
(1846-1899)
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.
(1876)
["Echoes," p. 125]
W. E. Henley, by William Rothenstein.
[Click on the image for more information.]
The critic Jerome Buckley, himself so important in the revival of interest in the nineteenth-century, saw Henley as having had a "profound influence on late Victorian literature" (vii) and regretted that this one poem should often have been seen as "the sum total of the author's accomplishment" (3). Nevertheless, he felt that the poem did attain, "when related to its proper context, all the emotional and intellectual impact of true poetry. It represents the logical culmination of a long struggle for life in the shadow of death. Its sources are profoundly personal; it arises literally 'out of the night,' out of the interminable hours of repose 'lived on one’s back,' out of the invalid’s desire to compensate his weakness in a 'manly' lust for battle" (3).
To George Meredith, with whom Henley struck up a literary friendship, the opening line had "a manful ring to clear and lift us, whatever the oppression that may have been caused. No realism frightens me. At its worst, I take it as a correction of the flimsy, to which our literature has a constant tendency to recur" (918). The two authors, despite being so different in poetic style, shared a natural buoyancy not rooted in (or perhaps one could say) not bounded by, orthodox religion, which could see them through difficult times and lead them to encourage others to overcome hurdles in the same spirit. — Jacqueline Banerjee
Bibliography
Buckley, Jerome. William Ernest Henley. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1945.
Henley, W.E. Poems. I. London: David Nutt, 1898. Internet Archive, from a copy in Stanford University. Web. 12 May 2026.
Meredith, George. The Letters of George Meredith. Edited by C.L. Cline. Vol. II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.
Created 12 May 2026