In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
These lines are from Invictus, by the Victorian poet WE Henley. They have recently been cited as a source of inspiration by Gordon Brown:
"It is about determination. It summarises my view [of being prime minister]." Brown came across his poetic motto after watching the film Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. In the film Mandela says that the poem helped him through his 27 years of imprisonment and he uses it to inspire the captain of the Springboks to victory in the rugby World Cup.
Before he endorsed it, Brown might have considered the poem's chequered past: it was recited by the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh moments before his execution by lethal injection in 2001 and it was used more recently by Jeffrey Archer as the epigraph to his prison memoir.
Henley himself wrote the poem while in hospital in the 1870s with tuberculosis of the bones. One of his legs had already been amputated below the knee and he was having experimental treatment to save the other leg, which involved scraping the bones of his foot with surgical instruments. It was 20 months of agony, but the foot was eventually saved. Henley started publishing poems while he was in hospital, and Invictus was the last in the series.
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In the circumstances it is understandable why Henley would thank "Whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul" and you can understand why a man who had been imprisoned for much of his adult life, such as Mandela, would warm to the lines "I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul." In extremis, you don't want anything too nuanced or laden with irony.
It might indeed find some appreciative readers among the double amputees who have come home from Afghanistan.
Whether it is appropriate as the credo of a man, like our prime minister, who faces no physical danger but is having a hard time doing the job he has wanted all his life is debatable. Determination is one thing, but being "unconquerable" is another.
It's inevitable perhaps that politicians, when they do quote poems, tend to head for the stirring uplands of late-Victorian certainty (modernist irony and ambiguity do not good soundbites make). Number one in the politician's book of spine-stiffeners is Kipling's If:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too
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Margaret Thatcher loved the poem, citing the line "If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue" as an influence. She quoted some lines of Yeats from The Second Coming - "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" - as an inspiration to her during her campaign to become party leader. How Yeats, a passionate Irish nationalist, would have felt about this political "sampling" of his work is another matter.
There has never been much love lost between politicians and poets, as the latter are by nature anti-establishment. Shelley called the government of the day in 1819:
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A century or so later Auden wrote about the poet's role in relation to politics:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky
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Even the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who was appointed by Brown, has no comfort for politicians:
... How it takes the breath away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,
makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,
of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk.
How it says this - politics - to your education education education; shouts this -
Politics! - to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your
conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS.
There was a time when the House of Commons might have summoned up an MP or two who could have replied to Duffy in nicely honed hexameters - Andrew Marvell was an MP, Disraeli wrote poetry as well as novels, Gladstone wrote Latin verse, Churchill's oratory owed a great deal to the reams of poetry he had memorised as a boy and in more recent times Lord Gowrie, who served under Thatcher as minister for the arts, was a published poet. But there is little poetry in politics today, unless you count the erotic lyrics written to their researchers by lovestruck MPs or Boris Johnson's slim volume called The Perils of the Pushy Parents.
Perhaps it is time to expand our politicians' poetic repertoire beyond the late 19th century. It should be a prerequisite of selection that would-be MPs memorise a number of poems. First among them might be A Limerick by Wendy Cope:
A talented young chimpanzee
Was keen to appear on tv
He wrote to Brooke Bond
But they didn't respond
So he had to become an MP.
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Apparently this poem has been seen pinned to more than one MP's study wall. But perhaps the poem that all would-be politicians should be compelled to memorise is The Leader by Roger McGough:
I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee, I'm the leader
I'm the leader
OK what shall we do?
Minette Marrin is away