Invictus

The poet begins (and stays) immersed in the night. Night symbolizes all of the trials, troubles, and challenges of life. By not particularizing what both challenges and terrifies the speaker, night becomes applicable to every person. The night represents that absolute condition of helplessness and vulnerability.

In the poem, night is total, “black as the pit from pole to pole” (Line 2). The poet borrows from scripture to suggest that there is about this condition of helplessness the feeling of Hell itself, the pit, Hell at its deepest and most forbidding. The poem risks hyperbole. But because the poem does not develop specifics, the poem uses night to convey not the reality of life’s challenges, terrors, and anxieties but rather how life can feel at times. In turn, the night, because it lacks illumination, associated with insight and wisdom, captures the poet’s feeling of confusion and alarm over how or why these conditions have happened, an element that makes all that much keener the suffering the speaker endures.

In asserting the irrelevancy of the traditional notion of God as operating manager of the cosmos, the poem asserts rather that the individual is operating manager not of the cosmos—that concept is too wide and too forbidding to allow the fantasy of some agency in control of it—but rather in absolute control of how the individual responds to conditions beyond their control or even their understanding.