If you want to get into even more of the Christmas spirit this holiday season, go see the movie Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood, starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon.

In the film, President Nelson Mandela campaigns to host the 1995 Rugby World Cup event as a means to unite his countrymen.  Apartheid, the previous social and political policy of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by white minority governments in South Africa, was still too painful for the countrymen to embrace Springbok, the all-white Rugby team.  

Mandela meets with the team captain, Francois Pienaar, before the start of the Rugby World Cup to pledge the country’s full support of him and the team. As a gesture of encouragement, Mandela hands Pienaar an envelope containing something that helped him endure his previous 27-year prison term. Later that evening, Pienaar opens the envelope to find the following poem:

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.

The words were so completely captivating, I quickly jotted down a couple phrases so that I could research the poem once I returned home.

The title of the poem is Invictus, written by the English poet William Ernest Henley in 1875. At the age of 12, Henley became a victim of tuberculosis of the bone. In spite of this, in 1867 he successfully passed the Oxford local examination as a senior student. His diseased foot had to be amputated directly below the knee. Physicians had announced that the only way to save his life was to amputate. Henley persevered and survived with one foot intact. He was discharged in 1875, and was able to lead an active life for nearly 30 years despite his disability. With an artificial foot, he lived until the age of 53. The poem was written from a hospital bed.

In my Google search I found that in reality, Mandela actually provided Pienaar with an extract from Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena”speech from 1910.

The speech is notable for the extended passage:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

The following passage was quoted by Richard Nixon in his resignation speech on August 8, 1974:

“Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, ‘whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…’”

Wow, Invictus and The Man in the Arena – two powerful documentaries. What a gift of  inspiration from Henley and Roosevelt to show us there isn’t anything that we can’t endure…

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.