Some years back, when I started to understand things happening around me. I noted down a poem in my personal diary. Writer of this poem (i.e. Ernest Henley) was not much popular that time as I know but after an incident he became world famous and his poem was published in all leading dailies of the world. He got fame in just a day, kudos to a bad guy named Timothy McVeigh. What I can remember that this guy was accused for a bomb blast in Oklahoma City due to which nearly 200 people died. This guy was accused for murder of those 200 people.
In a letter he requested be sent to the Observer, McVeigh said he was "borrowing a page from US foreign policy" and had "decided to send a message to a government that was becoming increasingly hostile by bombing a government building." He chose the Alfred P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City.
He was sentenced to death and died by lethal injection. McVeigh had confessed to the bombing, and referred to the execution as "state-assisted suicide". Timothy McVeigh chose the poem Invictus, which means "Unconquerable" in Latin, to be his final statement. He handed a handwritten copy of William Ernest Henley's poem to the prison warden, Harley Lappin, just before his death.
I was always able to inspire me with this poem especially from the last line i.e. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
Read this poem while keeping timothy in your mind- (a man who is going to die in some days, a man who doesn't know how world is going to take his name, a man who will get a place in history though with a wrong reason, a traitor, a rebel)
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
have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning’s 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.
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