What does the poem ‘Invictus’ used by Oprah in her Life 101 class mean?

It is a sad but immutable truth of the universe that everything on the internet eventually turns out to be about foot stuff. Foot stuff is the Kevin Bacon of instigators — you’re never more than six clicks away, and usually far fewer, from learning that Henry VIII was the way that he was because of a foot injury, or that Quentin Tarantino makes movies.

The fact remains consistent when learning the history of ‘Invictus,’ the stoic poem penned by William Ernest Henley, which Oprah Winfrey has made a mandatory part of her class called Life 101 she teaches in South Africa. Consider the closing lines of this indelible contribution to literature:

“It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishment the scroll

I am the master of my fate

I am the captain of my soul.”

As iconic a piece of writing, as you’re likely to find, it’s a brief and rhythmic glimpse into the mind of the unbent — a treatise on the voice inside us all, reminding us to push forward, to carry on, to seize the victory we have earned through hard work, perseverance, and courage. Churchill utilized ‘Invictus’ to rally support in the early days of the Second World War. Nelson Mandela inspired his fellow prisoners through recitations of Henley’s words.

It’s been referenced, alluded to, and quoted in the arts, from Casablanca to 30 Rock to, well, Invictus, and was invoked by Oprah herself in a recent CBS Sunday Morning interview. It would be difficult to overstate the impact that the poem has had on the world some 150 years after its creation, especially these lines which the former host employs to remind her class that “taking control of your emotions and not allowing your emotions to control you, taking the wheel, allows you to be the master of your fate and the captain of your soul.”

It is also, unavoidably, straight up all about feet. See, the 19th century was a firecracker of a time to be alive, and Henley found himself at the business end of a nasty bout of tuberculosis when he was just 12 years old. TB was for more than just making Val Kilmer interesting in Tombstone back in those days — in particularly unpleasant cases, the infection could spread beyond the lungs and infect the skeleton, as was the case with young William, whose tuberculosis made it into the bones of his leg. The treatment in those days was two heaping scoops of getting your leg chopped off, and Henley took his medicine, losing every inch of lefty below the knee.

Time passed. Henley went about his life, writing, getting his abscesses drained, and – no kidding – becoming the actual inspiration for Long John Silver in Treasure Island through his friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson. Sadly, though, life couldn’t be all wide-gauge syringes and piraticalism, and Henley’s infection spread to the bones of his right leg.

According to a paper on the subject written by S.M. Faisal Arafat in the IJELS, in a desperate bid to keep his remaining getaway stick, Henley signed up for experimental treatments in which his infected bone tissue was gradually, painfully scraped away from his foot by a surgeon. He would spend the next 16 months in a hospital bed, but he’d spend those months happily in the company of his last remaining gam.

Pleased as punch at his having spit in the eye of leg death, Henley penned an untitled poem on the importance of concrete resolve in the face of adversity. The poem would go on to be published and republished under half a dozen or so different names before being finally branded “Invictus,” Latin for ‘Unconquered,” when it was printed in The Oxford Book of English Verse in 1900.

And that’s your WGTC Foot Fact^tm for the day. Full disclosure, we haven’t gotten the green light to move ahead with the WGTC Foot Fact^tm initiative yet, but hopefully, this will get the ball rolling.

What does the poem ‘Invictus’ used by Oprah in her Life 101 class mean?
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