Victorian Poetry

KAREN ALKALAY-GUT

frightened like "an infant crying in the night" (AT LIV, 19). Yet where
Tennyson's poem moves toward a position where it is possible to imagine
that God finally cares for humanity, in "Nerves" Symons's lover is left like a
child screaming at the thought that there is no "heaven" that will save him
from his "agony of love and loss."
In his groundbreaking essay "The Decadent Movement in Literature"
(1893), Symons critically reflects on many of the characteristic features that
we can see in poems such as "The Opium Smoker" and "Nerves."
"Decadent" writing, he claims, involves "an intense self-consciousness," "a
restless curiosity in research," an "over-subtilizing refinement upon refine-
ment," and a "spiritual and moral perversity." 24 Each of these qualities
underlines the assumption that "Decadence" marks a falling away from a
classical period of artistic perfection, a period in which was simple, sane,
and proportionate. Although his discussion of Decadence mainly concen-
trates on the works of French poets such as Paul Verlaine, Symons identifies
two English writers as representatives of this movement: the critic Pater;
and the poet William Ernest Henley. In many respects, Henley seems an
unusual choice, since he is remembered today for the one poem that is
supposed to embody Victorian strength of character. Initially, the poem
best known as "Invictus" (1875) but later retitled "Echoes, IV" looks like
an incantatory profession of faith in one's power to overcome the doom
and gloom that confronted Decadent writers like Symons:

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. 25

Perhaps surprisingly, this apparent embodiment of fearless Victorian values
bears strong similarities to the prevailing ideas that informed Symons's

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