Thick Is the Darkness

Thick Is the Darkness
 
Thick is the darkness -
     Sunward, O, sunward!
Rough is the highway -
     Onward, still onward!
 
Dawn harbors surely
     East of the shadows.
Facing us somewhere
     Spread the sweet meadows.
 
Upward and forward!
     Time will restore us:
Light is above us,
     Rest is before us.
 
by William Ernest Henley
 
William Ernest Henley was born in 1849. He was an influential poet, critic and editor of the late-Victorian era in England. He is regarded as having as central a role in his time as Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century. He is remembered most often for his poem “Invictus” (1875), a piece which recurs in popular awareness. It is one of his hospital poems from early battles with tuberculosis, and is said to have developed the artistic motif of poet as a patient, and to have anticipated modern poetry in form and subject matter. William Ernest Henley passed on in 1903.