McVeigh's last statement written by a master of last words

By BOYD TONKIN

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.


In death, the mass-murderer Timothy McVeigh has achieved an odd sort of affinity with the outrageous gay playwright Joe Orton. Both will be remembered, in part, for lines they borrowed from the Victorian poet, William Ernest Henley (1849-1903).


Orton took the title of a play from Henley's 1888 poem, To W R:


Madame Life's a piece in bloom

Death goes dogging everywhere.

She's the tenant of the room

He's the ruffian on the stair.


Now the ruffian on the stair has knocked on McVeigh's own door. Perhaps, if he had known of Orton's title, he would have plumped for another terminal verse.


Rudyard Kipling's If, perhaps?


For two generations, that poem and Henley's Invictus stiffened the spine and the upper lips of English imperial adventurers.


In tandem, Kipling and Henley - in their jingoistic mode - acted as semi-official bards of the colonial class, beating the drum of patriotic sacrifice that led, in time, into the killing fields of the First World War.


Sounds just the right theme-tune for a white-supremacist maniac. And yet Henley, if you look closely, turns out to be as complex a figure as Kipling.


One of the most intriguing facts about the "boisterous and piratic" writer and editor was that he gave his friend and collaborator Robert Louis Stevenson the inspiration for Long John Silver in Treasure Island.


Stevenson, sensitive to the point of morbidity, chose his literary chums well - and they did not include boors, bullies and bigots of the sort that McVeigh might admire.


But Silver, of course, boasted a wooden leg. The hearty, rugged Henley struggled all his life with disability. Tubercular arthritis led to a foot amputation in youth.


It hardly needs a psychoanalyst to find a link between the reality of the bed-ridden, handicapped poet and the fantasy of the swashbuckling, gung-ho conqueror.


McVeigh should have read much more Henley: not on Death Row, but before he ever packed his truck with home-made explosives. Henley's 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.


- INDEPENDENT