Invictus Triangle

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 punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Invictus, by William Earnest Henley

This triangle takes its name from writer William Ernest Henley’s (1849-1903) poem Invictus. The poem is drawn from Henley’s experience recovering from the amputation of his left leg in an Edinburgh hospital at a time when hospitalization often meant death.

William Ernest Henley was born on August 23, 1849 in Gloucester, England. Henley departed his home city for London at the age of eighteen, but left the city the two years later after he was bothered by foot pain. Thinking that sea air might improve the situation, Henley traveled to the resort city of Margate. While there, tubercular arthritis infected his foot, causing necrosis of the bone.

Henley had his left leg amputated in 1867, after which doctors told him that his other leg might have to be removed as well. Refusing their diagnosis, Henley sought out Joseph Lister (1827-1912), the doctor who was in the process of pioneering antiseptic surgery. Henley entered the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh in 1873 determined to beat the infection and keep his remaining leg. During his stay, Henley wrote a collection of poems titled In Hospital. Invictus was written during Henley’s hospitalization but was included only in a later collection, Echoes, because it did not fit thematically with the other poems in the collection.

After leaving the hospital, Henley returned to London and, in 1878, married Anna Boyle, the sister of Captain Boyle, a fellow patient of Henley’s in the infirmary. During the same year, Henley began collaborating with writer Robert Lewis Stevenson (1850-1894) on several plays. The duo would write Deacon Brodie (1879), Beau Austin (1884), Admiral Guinea (1884), and Macaire (1825), before their friendship eroded in 1888. In the same year Henley would publish two more collections of poems: A Book of Verses and Bric-à-brac. Echoes, the collection in which Invictus first appeared was published in 1892 marking the end of the poet’s most productive period.

Henley would publish two more collections of poems, Rhymes and Rhythms, consisting of his writings from 1889 to 1892 and Hawthorn and Lavender, published serially from 1899 to 1901 in the North American Review. In 1897, Henley made a bid to succeed Tennyson as Poet Laureate of England but the attempt was unsuccessful and resulted only in a Civil Service Pension of 225 pounds. Henley would receive the pension until his death in 1902, when a fall from a horse aggravated the same tubercular arthritis in his leg.

In 2000, several plantings were installed in Invictus Triangle, adding greenery to the intersection of Henley Avenue and Charlecote Ridge in the Jamaica section of Queens. The triangle is part of the Greenstreets program, a Parks project whose goal is to convert paved street properties, such as triangles and malls, into green spaces.