William Ernest Henley's "Invictus": Battling with Fate and Fortune

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MAIYA: 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.

JOE: Hello, and welcome to season five of Beyond the Verse. I'm delighted to be joined by my co-host, Maiya. We've been away for a little while, but we are very happy to be back with you, bringing you a whole new season of poem analysis. [00:01:00] We cannot wait to get into this season. Maybe we'll even have a discussion later on about some of the amazing episodes we've got to look forward to. But today's episode is all about the poem that you've just heard Maiya read beautifully, which is William Ernest Henley's wonderful 1888 poem, "Invictus," one of the most iconic poems of its era that continues to resonate to the present day. We're gonna be talking about a range of themes today, including human resilience, the Christian echoes in the poem, and how Henley's work transcends its original context. Now, we wanna get straight into the poem, but without dwelling too long on his biography, I just wanna point out a couple of important details that are gonna hopefully enrich people's understanding of the poem. So Henley is born in 1848 and dies in 1903, so he dies just two years after Queen Victoria, and his life, in many ways, can be used as a kind of lens through which modern readers like us can understand the Victorian era and some of its values, and we're gonna talk about that later on. the two kind of salient details that I want listeners to be aware of with regards to this poem both occur in Henley's [00:02:00] adolescence. So at the age of about 12, he begins to suffer from tuberculosis, an illness that will ultimately define his life. his leg has to be amputated at the age of 18, so this is a really, really salient and important aspect of his life, and obviously, it goes on to inform a great many aspects of his writing life, including this poem. The reason for that is because in the early 1870s, the... he receives the news that he has to have his other leg amputated for the same reason, and he basically pushes back against this, and he ends up going to a doctor in Edinburgh, Joseph Lister, and spends nearly two years of his life in hospital as Lister, has him go through a series of operations that ultimately save his right leg.

And it is during this time in hospital that he writes the poem, "Invictus." The other salient fact I want listeners to be aware of also occurs in his adolescence while he's at school, while he's suffering with tuberculosis, which is that he has an inspirational head teacher, Thomas Edward Brown, who's not massively well-known today but was a respected poet of his time, and, uh, Henley referred to him as the first genius that he ever met.

So in these formative teenage years when his [00:03:00] body is already beginning to fail him, his imaginative powers, his love of literature is awakening through this inspirational teacher. And those are two details I want listeners to bear in mind, the frailty of the human body as juxtaposed against the kind of limitlessness of the human imagination. But Maiya, we're not a history podcast. Let's get into the poem itself, and any regular listeners, anyone who's enjoyed previous series of Beyond the Verse will know that Maiya and I share, an affection for discussing poetic titles, and we've got a particularly interesting one today

MAIYA: Well, thank you so much, Joe. I think it was really useful to have that context before we really dive into this poem. as you say, titles are kind of our bread and butter, I want to say. And this poem was an absolute treat to research. So generally when we're looking at poems, we're looking at poems that have been titled by the person who has written them.

They've gone to publication with that intended title. This is not the case with Invictus. Invictus was actually published in 1888. It was written in 1875, but published nearly 13 years [00:04:00] later, and it wasn't titled until 1900. Now I'm sure, Joe, that we'll discuss the impact of this on our interpretations of the poem, but invictus was not the poem's title when it was first published. In fact, it didn't have one at all, which means that throughout the years various publications actually just gave it a title. I've got a whole list of them written down here, but some include Myself, Song of a Strong Soul, Clear Grit, Master of His Fate, and one very, very particular one I'd like to delve into is Urbs Fortitudinis, which means strong city.

It's a reference to the Bible, Isaiah 26, and it's often used in morning prayer. And that in translation means strong city. Now, when we're talking about the individual in this poem, I'm really interested in how the given titles for this poem impact our reception of it because, of course, Invictus has this incredible legacy in even just pop culture.

You know, we talk about the Invictus Games, which was founded in 2014 [00:05:00] by Prince Harry, which celebrates kind of military veterans, injured and ill soldiers who compete in these games as a method to uplift hope. So Invictus has become this word in its own right.

It means unconquerable in Latin. But these other titles really reframe the poem in different ways. Now, I know I've mentioned a whole host of titles Is there one you'd like to start with, Joe? Is there one you want to dive into 

JOE: I, like you, I was really drawn to that strong city because what interests me so much about Henley's work, and we're gonna get into this, and the poem's remarkable afterlife, 'cause it really has kind of transcended its, its original context, as I mentioned in the intro. But this is an individual poem about an individual experience, and yet even that title speaks to something larger.

It speaks to something about a group of people, whether that's defined by a city or indeed a nation. And there's something very kind of Rule Britannia about the poem, this idea of the Brit or the Englishman perhaps as some kind of destined [00:06:00] individual and destined people. And that blurring of an individual experience with the experience of a collective group I think is so telling about the kind of worldview at the time in the late 19th century, where Britain did rule the waves, and Britain had this sense of its global destiny as an unconquerable people.

I mean, part of the British DNA, incorrectly or correctly, is the idea that Britain has not been successfully invaded since 1066. There is a sense to which, Britain's borders are inviolable. And I find it telling that as early as, the immediate years and decades after publication, people were drawing connections between the individual experience and some kind of national story. And I think it's no coincidence, therefore, that in 1941, when Britain is under greater threat of invasion than it has been, in centuries, Churchill reaches for these words in an address to Parliament, and he says, uh, he paraphrases the poem's final two lines. Instead of, I am the master of my fate," he says, "We are still the masters of our fate, and we are still the captains of our soul."

And there is [00:07:00] something about the blending of the individual and the collective experience that I think that title that you mentioned really speaks to early in the poem's story

MAIYA: And it's fascinating, isn't it? Because we can't really neglect the context of this poem. It was written whilst Henley was in a hospital bed suffering through this very personal, very intimate illness. And what I find so interesting is that sort of carry through where we translate a very personal, very individual experience onto a wider community. And I'd love to kind of delve into some of the language, I think, to really explore this, because we see quite a clear transition in this poem. We begin with a very passive, phrasing, I would call it.

" Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole." We have this impression of an individual who isn't in control. They are being covered by something, and that darkness, that blackness is all-consuming. As we then move through the poem, we, of course, have those more declarative I's that [00:08:00] come in.

"I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul." So you have this impression that you traverse the sort of lack of control that we are introduced to at the start of this poem through to self-affirmation. That, to me, makes this poem incredibly, incredibly personal, and I find it so interesting that we've applied it to this sense of national pride almost because I would argue that what Henley is speaking to here is your own personal sense of drive, ambition, control. He explicitly tells us that he's in conflict with the ideas of fate, predestination, and what we can explore in this poem is his feelings of uncertainty towards that and how he takes control of his own story.

So I love that it's been taken out of context in that sense but this again leads back to our impression of the title because Invictus in itself, I mean, one, using any sort of Latin phrasing, I think, creates a sort of weight of [00:09:00] history when you're talking about a poem like this.

But contrast that with a poem that is titled Myself, as it was in 1888 by one publisher. Myself then feels very removed from this slightly grander, wider sense of impressionability because you explore a very personal conflict. So I'm really interested in how those titles play off against the context of the poem and the content of the poem as well because imagine reading this with that title Myself, you then feel as if you're kind of intimately involved with the thoughts of this speaker, this narrator. Whereas when you take Invictus, and especially with the weight it carries now as a modern reader, it carries a bit more history to it. And I would be so curious to know how many people read this poem for the first time and actually absorb the context of what they know about the term invictus before they even read the poem

JOE: Yeah, I think you're totally right. There is a certain kind of grandiosity that any kind of Latin word imbues in a poem. And, any poem that has... I [00:10:00] mean, in my other life, I'm a tutor, and I often use the example of teaching Romeo and Juliet to students for the first time. Any time a student arrives at a famous text, they carry baggage before they even open the book for the first time or read the first line of the poem, and this is one of those poems.

I mean, it's regularly listed amongst the best known and the best loved poems, in British life. And there is something, I think, that is potentially dangerous about arriving at a poem with too many preconceptions of what you're about to see. I'm sure for a lot of, 21st century readers, the first, experience of this poem may well have been the, Clint Eastwood film, Invictus, which kind of uses the story of the 1995 Rugby World Cup and the story of Mandela leaving prison.

He was inspired by this poem, and he read it while he was incarcerated. any way you arrive at a poem is a great way. I mean, we're lovers of poetry. We want people to experience poems. It's always wonderful when a piece of poetry breaks through into the cultural mainstream like it did in that movie.

But I'm always hesitant, because sometimes that means that students or readers get the wrong impression or carry the wrong, lessons into the text. And always remember that when you're reading a poem, read it as though you [00:11:00] have never heard of it before. Read it for what it is, and then challenge those preconceptions afterwards rather than letting those preconceptions color your experience of the poem. But let's get into this first stanza, 'cause I think your point that you made, Maiya, is an excellent one about the pacificity of this voice. And what I think is really curious is that in that first stanza, we get a me before we get an I. And that might seem like a kind of pedantic thing to look at, but the me is acted upon and the I acts.

And we have to remember that this is a man who, since he was a 12-year-old boy, had been treated, had had experiences in hospital, had had drugs administered to him, and surgeons tell him what he needed. This is somebody who has lived a life in which they are not in control, a life that is defined by the decisions of others, whether it be parents, teachers, doctors. And I think it's no coincidence that we get the me and ultimately the I, as Maiya alluded to, grows stronger as the poem goes on and as Henley himself grows more confident in his own sense of agency

MAIYA: I couldn't agree more. I think it's such [00:12:00] an interesting way to start this poem. What I'd love to delve into, I think, is that language and the way that we see that development come about in this poem. I'm interested primarily in the speaker's relationship to his body, and I think as we're talking about, you know, a young boy who's been through the most horrendous medical history you could have as a child, to lose a leg and to have to suffer the consequences of that throughout your entire life.

We have a mention of the soul before we have a mention of the body. Again, we have the mention of the me before we have the I, but the soul is directly related to this sort of sense of darkness. It's almost the shining light within that darkness. And I'm interested in exploring the body in this poem and our relation to the body because before we have any mention of kind of a physicality, we have the unconquerable soul. Now this, of course, is the core of the poem. This is where we get much of the inspiration of the legacy of this poem from. And of [00:13:00] course, unconquerable is where the term Invictus was drawn from.

It comes in our very first stanza. But the soul here is under threat, and that I think is really critical to explore because this soul stands almost as a beacon of light within the darkness that the poet sets up. We have a night that covers the speaker, black as the pit from pole to pole. We have this really strong image of a world immersed in darkness.

And I can't remember what episode it was now, but we did a bit of a deep dive into the symbolism of day and night. And night to me in many, many poems tends to reflect the end of your life. It tends to be the twilight of your life. It reflects old age. Of course, here we're talking about a relatively young poet, a young speaker.

I mean at the time he wrote this, he was, you know, 26 years old. I appreciate it was published later, but he was still a very young man. Of course, the question that we have to ask here is does that feeling of age and does the impending sense of [00:14:00] doom and time come from the fact that he is suffering? Do we get an impression here of looming death?

And that's what I'd really like to dig into, because we take this as a wonderfully strong poem about kind of conquering fate, conquering your soul. But I'm interested to know where death sits in this poem. Because personally, I read this poem, and it'd be many, many years since I'd last looked at it, and I said to Joe before the podcast that I was kind of taken aback by how I misread it.

I remembered more about how we feel about the poem as opposed to the actual context, and that darkness is something that I think is really pervasive in this poem. And that sense of death and finality really sits at odds with this sense of championing yourself, championing your ability to exist in dire situations .

I'd love to know your thoughts on that, Joe

JOE: it's a really interesting question, and it speaks to some of the innate contradictions of the poem and indeed of the man, I think, because you're [00:15:00] right, the space this poem occupies in our cultural imagination is one of optimism, is one of kind of defiance. And yet actually when you read the poem, there is just as much depressive imagery and dark imagery and a sense of hopelessness. I mean, there's no mention of heaven after death. The only thing that seems to be presented if the poet does die is, a kind of hellish description. I mean, pit, the word used in the first stanza, is literally mentioned twice in the Bible, once in Revelation, once in, in Psalms, to refer to hell, to refer to kind of Satan's domain.

So it's not just the darkness of death, it's the darkness of what comes after, and we get another allusion to kind of divine punishment later on with the reference to the scroll. so I think you're right that in a poem that we associate with being about defiance and optimism, there is a striking amount of darkness.

But that in many ways, I think, speaks to the strangeness of this literary figure. I mean, contemporary descriptions of him describe him, obviously, he's, he's missing a leg, and he is this kind of big, bearded, burly individual, and yet everyone speaks to the kind of lightness of touch and the vivacity of the individual.

And I think [00:16:00] undeniably this is a man of contradiction. In terms of the pervasiveness of death, I think without wishing to kind of over-psychologize the individual or to, to apply retrospective judgments, but this is written at the end of two years spent in hospital, two years of operations, two years of potential gangrene or potential infection.

Remember that he was taking a risk by not having this leg amputated. Most medical advice suggested he should have his second leg amputated as well. And so it feels to me like somebody reckoning with their own decision constantly, because he must have known that every day he denied the operation that would have removed his second leg, he was potentially flirting with his own demise. And I don't know whether to view the poem as a kind of psychological reckoning with that decision, but I think you're right that to only talk about this poem in terms of defiance and optimism is to miss the darkness, both literal and emotional, that runs throughout the entire work.

MAIYA: I think this is a really great time to get into the sort of biblical echoes that we see in this poem, because it's important to note that Henley [00:17:00] was an atheist through and through. There are many, many sources that claim he absolutely refused any form of God. And of course, we have this line in the opening stanza, "Whatever gods may be."

And in the end, we obviously have this sort of self-proclamation of almost a form of godhood. If you master your own fate, you are inevitably the god of your own life because you have utter control. However, I find that Henley tends to borrow from biblical stories, from certain passages in order to sort of make sense of that reckoning that you mentioned, Joe.

And one thing that I'd really like to explore is this reference to the strait gate. Now, this is a direct reference to Matthew 7:13. And to paraphrase, this says, "Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life." And strait here is spelled S-T-R-A-I-T, which is not straight as in heading towards something directly, but strait as [00:18:00] in narrow. So we're already condensing this sort of feeling of pressure, this feeling of uncertainty, and it really ties into what you were saying, Joe, where I think Henley's reckoning with his own life is borrowing this phrase from the Bible where we suggest that the way to get to life is not the easy path.

You have to choose the hard path in order to almost rectify your sense of a lack of control. And I really enjoyed how for an atheist, this seems like a very specific and very intentional choice. And of course, we're talking about Victorian England here, so the majority of the people reading this would not have been secular.

They would've been going to church regularly. They would've understood these biblical references. So the choice to employ that in a poem when you yourself are an atheist is such an interesting one because it, talks to wider themes of reckoning, the hellscapes that we see him sort of create in this poem.

You know, you have the looming horror of the [00:19:00] shade, black as the pit, the bludgeonings of chance. These are all references to or images of some sort of devilish or satanistic abject horror that really comes from That feeling of not having fate in your hands, of not having certainty around the way your life will progress, of feeling challenged and uncertain and unsure.

I find these biblical references that kind of pop up in this poem really unique ways of borrowing wider motifs, wider stories I would call them, to create a message outside of the poem. There's a lot of intertextuality here

JOE: I mean, there is so much going on there. I'm so glad you mentioned that line, "Whatever gods may be," because for me, it's, it's just doing so much of the work of the poem. And, and I think you've struck upon one of the reasons that this poem has transcended its Victorian context, 'cause it would be very easy to look at this poem as a kind of relic of a world that we no longer really recognize, and, you know, it, I mean, increasingly, with regard to its attitude to pain and suffering.

I mean, the kind of pride [00:20:00] that Henley takes in the second stanza, "In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud," speaks to a stiff upper lip mentality, boys don't cry, a defiance of our own emotions that actually I think most modern readers look at as outdated and look at as, a kind of, a relic of a bygone era. But the poem does still resonate with people. It is still a much beloved poem, and I think this question of religiosity is at the core of that because we live in a post-Christian world in the West. We live in a secular world, but We don't have a post-Christian language. Our language, our sense of the world, the way in which we understand the world remains inflected by biblical stories, by, religious language, religious values, religious ideals, religious images. And what you have in this poem is almost Henley wrestling with that. The whatever gods may be is a dismissive kind of offhand remark about the false hope that people place in these idols, doesn't even think to give a god a name, whereas most people at the end of their [00:21:00] life who are worried and nervous cling closer to religion because it promises that they're going to be okay.

Henley kind of waves it away, and yet, as Maiya says, by the end of the poem, he is back to using the language of, faith, the language of God. These are words lifted from Jesus on the Sermon on the Mount, from the Bible passage that Maiya mentioned. And I think that might be one of the reasons the poem remains so beloved, because that's the same world that we inherit.

We, you know, we live in a world that is in many ways post-Christian and secular, and yet our language is still so tied up in religiosity that you almost can't escape the assumptions of a Christian world. I don't know if I've just been reading too much of Tom Holland's Dominion recently, but that sense of Christianity by another name being the driving force of the way we live our lives I think is so present in this poem. it feels strikingly modern even though it was written in the 1870s.

MAIYA: And Joe, I love that you've touched on that sense of language having kind of not developed out of that Christian mentality. Because of course there is something as well that I [00:22:00] think is incredibly romantic about religious language. Naturally, when you're talking about things that are greater than the human, you are already adding an element of grandiosity to that narrative. You're already talking about the soul and fate that might be entangled within that. So I find that the poem, despite the aversion it has to religion, stories that it borrows, the language that it borrows, actually does create that wider sense of inflection.

Averse to that, I'd like to take it in a slightly different route because there are also incredibly modern notions within this poem. And one of the things that really struck me in this poem was that, you know, in my day job , we do a lot of research into how speakers work, for example. And one of the things that if you're delivering to a room of people, if you're writing something that is built to be convincing, the first and foremost piece of advice you receive is that you shouldn't dwell on the things that you haven't done.

If you're going to sell something [00:23:00] to someone, you don't say, "Oh, you know, this pen is not slow. This pen is not gonna run out of ink," because people can only focus on the negatives. They're only able to shift focus and remember the things that you've mentioned and that's not what we see here.

We see a lot of nots. " I have not winced nor cried aloud." And I'm interested in the, impact that that has on our memory because we talk about how this poem has an incredible legacy, an incredible, memory within the kind of collective population. But we tend to forget that there are these nots in the poem.

And given we have this mentality of, okay, you don't focus on the things that you haven't done because then it's not convincing, why is it that we're so convinced by this poem? We're so incredibly convinced that he has become the captain of his soul that you don't stop to think about the things that he is telling you explicitly that he probably has done, winced nor cried aloud.

We have a speaker who has gone through immense pain, so of course, those things would be natural. And I, think [00:24:00] again, Joe, for you, it refers to that stiff-upper-lip mentality that I absolutely cannot be in pain nor show it. I have to be braver. I have to be stronger. I have to be more resilient. And for a poem that is so focused on creating that sense of resilience, we have a lot of references to physical damage.

We have wincing, crying, bludgeoning, the head being bloody. And I appreciate all of these things come with a counterweight to say that, "Okay, well, yes, these might be the case, but I've moved past it. My head is unbowed." We still have an entire stanza of this poem that is dedicated to the sort of representation of that pain.

So I guess my question is- What is the purpose of abstracting it? What is the purpose of telling us these incidents rather than just talking about how strong you are, rather than talking about how resilient you are? To offer the counterpoint, I think actually creates a bridge because you start from this incredibly low moment and you move [00:25:00] up to this point of utter control, and I think it's more, for this poem at least, about the journey rather than the ending point

JOE: I think that's a fascinating point and actually and again, Tom Holland should sponsor this episode. No, that's not Marvel's Tom Holland because I can't help but think that that stanza you're referring to, the bloody head, not wincing or crying aloud, these are deeply ingrained Christian assumptions about goodliness and about the place where the most moral is in the victim, is in the person who suffers and suffers kind of without complaint. And that comes from the figure of Christ. I mean, my head is bloody, but unbowed could equally be a- a description given to Christ on the cross, wearing the crown of thorns. There are these deep-rooted assumptions that even the most ardent atheists cannot escape that we hold in the West, which is that the meek, the humble, the victims are ultimately those who are the best people, the most moral, the ones who shall inherit the earth. And Henley, I think, must have been aware, he was a very well-educated man, must have been aware that while he rejects these things with one hand, he cannot escape them and ends [00:26:00] up reaching for them with the other when he looks to imbue the poem with these images. And the other thing about those, descriptions that I really like is the temptation when reading that stanza, I think, is to assume kind of a degree of movement. But when you actually dig into the description, there is no movement implied. None of the ways in which the speaker describes themselves require them to be moving. They are in the clutch of something.

Well, that implies they cannot move. They're trapped. They have not winced or cried. Okay, well, again, wincing and crying are things you can do while stationary. Likewise, you don't have to be moving to be bludgeoned. Your head being bloody does not imply you are moving. And these descriptions serve to remind us that this is a poem written in a hospital bed.

And whenever we do these episodes now, I can't help but think back to the back catalog, and there was two poems that really came to mind when reading this one. One that I was perhaps expecting, which is Rudyard Kipling's If-, which is a poem obviously of a similar era that similarly expresses an archetype of the masculine, the way in which a man, a male figure, is perhaps meant to behave in the face of [00:27:00] adversity. But the one that I wasn't expecting that came to mind was when we did, way back in season one, How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the discussion we had in that, episode about how physical frailty and physical illness informs a writer's worldview in ways that we often kind of can't appreciate unless you really stop to think about it. We talked about Frida Kahlo, and we talked about other artists whose physical limitations, the pain that they were in, is present in their work. And I, I really get that when I read this second stanza, because the sense of being stationary in the face of things happening to you is so innately a part of his experience that of course it finds its way into his poem.

And yet for us, the temptation to run, the temptation to flee from these things is a temptation that is not afforded to a speaker, in a poem written by Henley. Because of course, Henley was never able to run from his adversity, either physically because he had one leg, or indeed emotionally because you can't run from illness

MAIYA: No, it's something I hadn't considered, that sense [00:28:00] of being stationary. And I know this might sound a little crazy to say as someone who studies poems practically for a living, but I was shocked to realize that it was octosyllabic the whole way through. That is having eight syllables in each line. And I think the reason I was shocked is because of how stress is handled, particularly on those syllables.

I was actually particularly shocked about the second stanza, because I thought in my head, even when I read it out at the start of this episode, that there was far more syllables than there were, and I think it's the impression that we get from those slightly longer words. I mean, the words in this poem, the majority of them are monosyllabic.

Out of the night that covers me, covers being the only one that has two syllables there. But then when you have a word like bludgeonings that comes in, punishments the scroll, visually the poem sends you almost a disruptive vision to those lines. It was striking to me that for a poem that is so incredibly regular, you know, we have rhyme consistently the whole way through: pole, soul, aloud, unbowed, shade, unafraid, scroll, soul.

[00:29:00] That we have such a juncture and a split from where we move from someone who is incredibly passive and undergoing this submission to pain, this submission to stress, and then we move out of it. Because in my mind, I feel form very often reflects the content of the poem really. We've talked about so many poems on our podcast where the form starts to break or fracture in order to show that difference.

So there's a really skillful play with language here that I'd be interested to see. I know, Joe, you had some thoughts on the rhyme in this poem

JOE: Yeah, definitely. So the rhyme scheme is a fairly simple ABAB, where you have these kind of alternating rhymes. and there's kind of-- I was thinking about this before the episode began, and one of the interpretations that I find often with those alternating rhymes, those simple rhyme schemes, is this sense of progression and movement. in many ways, it could also be the opposite and could be a kind of return, 'cause the sound returns to the previous sound. But this sense of a kind of ABAB, alternating almost left right pattern, [00:30:00] I've always associated with physical movement, the physical footsteps of a person as they traverse. And in the context of this poem, that's an avenue really worth exploring because this is a poem written by somebody who could not walk and who was not traversing anywhere. They were confined to their bed. And I think it speaks to that sense of duality I alluded to right at the top of the episode around early in his life, Henley was tussling with, on the one hand, the kind of shrinking of his physical world, while his, imagination was being expanded in the way that we often do when we're teenagers, when you're learning things, you're kind of, exposed to writers and thinkers and ideas that previously you either didn't care to comprehend or didn't comprehend or were never exposed to. And there's two things happening at once. There's the physical world he occupies growing smaller, his ability to move freely through the world, diminishing, while his imagination is soaring and while he is suddenly thinking about the possibilities of poetry and literature and broader art forms. And I find that this, alternating rhyme scheme speaks to a momentum emotionally and intellectually, [00:31:00] even as, his body is kind of failing him and he is stagnant physically. And I think this interpretation was strengthened, in particular, this notion of marching or walking. And to Maiya's point about the octosyllabic beat, there is a kind of marching rhythm to this poem as you go through it.

He actually wrote a note to a friend while in hospital in which he slightly darkly jokes that, "I fear my marching days are over." And the reason I think that's so darkly comic is, of course, he had already lost a leg at this point. He was already not able to march. So there is this slightly black humor around the nature of that joke, but I think it, clearly physical movement or the lack of it was on his mind during the process of writing this poem.

And I find that ABAB rhyme scheme speaks to a kind of forward momentum that exists regardless of his inability to physically propel himself forward

MAIYA: I think that's a great place to tie off this episode because it really loops back to what we were saying right at the top of this episode about how this speaker is heading towards life. They are going for [00:32:00] something that inevitably is theirs to take hold of, and that is why the legacy of this poem has been so, so immense.

But it's been a pleasure to talk to you, Joe, today. I'm so excited that we're back for season five. Do you want to tell listeners what we're in for next week?

JOE: I'd love to, and may I reiterate that sentiment, Maiya? We are so happy to be back, and we have an amazing set of episodes to come. I won't give them all away, but we're gonna be tackling some huge hitters, including The Odyssey in this series, as well as doing another national poetry episode to supplement other ones we did on Irish poetry and Japanese poetry.

And if you can't wait for subsequent episodes to come out, of course, you can dig into the extensive back catalog. We've got to be over 50 episodes by now, which is hugely exciting. There's so much there to enjoy. But next week, we are gonna be zooming in on Gabriel Okara's Once Upon a Time. I cannot wait to do this one, but with you, Maiya, 'cause it's such a rich and fascinating poem. But until then, it's goodbye from me

MAIYA: And goodbye from me and the entire team at PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+. Until next time[00:33:00]