"...I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul."

I didn't have a computer yesterday, so today is "Thoughtful Thursday" on Friday...

In my 11th grade English class, we were required to memorize several poems.  It was not my favorite part of the class. No where near it in fact. I don't really like poetry. I can appreciate the skill it takes to write it, but I just always feel like the writers of it are trying much too hard to dig deep. Even though that's sort of the point of poetry; digging deep.

But there was one poem that struck a chord with me. It was "Invictus" by William Ernst Henley.  We were memorizing it around the same time that the movie Invictus was coming out in theatres so it was fairly familiar to us all.  Although then, I couldn't have known that it would be so important to me, I made a copy of it and I tucked it away for safe keeping.

Yesterday, I was straightening my room (that wasn't even messy!) and I pulled a blanket up from the ground and out came a sheet of paper from nowhere. It was Invictus. The poem that I just kind of enjoyed memorizing in high school so I made a copy. I read through it and I started to cry. Crying is definitely not strange for me. I do it on almost a daily basis, so I'm not sure why it was so different this time, but I stood up, wiped away my tears and I faced the day. All I thought about the rest of the day was that poem. "I am the master of my fate: I am the captian of my soul."  I can't give anyone else that position.

I make my fate. I am responsible for me and for the way that I feel and the way that I am. "I am the master of my fate:  I am the captain of my soul."

Invictus

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.