Crosses and Troubles...

Literary Commentary

"Crosses and Troubles..." is a twelve-line stoic life-survey that William Ernest Henley dated 1888-1889 and placed in the "Echoes" section of A Book of Verses (1888), the same volume that first printed the poem the world now knows as "Invictus." Henley was thirty-nine when he began it: newly appointed editor of the Scots Observer, married to Anna Boyle, father of an infant daughter. The poem is a mid-career inventory, not a deathbed farewell.

The voice is plainer than Invictus and the rhythm looser. Where the more famous poem clenches its iambic tetrameter into something march-like, this one talks. Anapestic feet drift in ("I've COM-forted HERE, and I SUC-coured THERE"); the syntax is anaphoric ("I have… I've… I've…"); whole lines fall into proverbial cadences ("Come storm, come shine, whatever befall"). The single parenthesis, "(God bless them)," is the only moment the speaker breaks from his catalogue to offer a blessing, and it lands in the second line like a small concession the rest of the poem refuses.

The list itself is the argument. Crosses, women, work, dreams, art, drink, comfort given, foes faced, friends backed, blunders, amends, prayer, despair: nothing is ranked, nothing is romanticised, and nothing is left out. Then, at line 9, the inventory ends and the speaker turns. "Now I look before, as I look behind." What follows is the closing claim, "For the end I know is the best of all," which is not a forecast of imminent death but a stoic affirmation that whatever comes will be met by a constant mind. It is Invictus rendered in a quieter register, with declaration replaced by reckoning, and the unconquered soul replaced by the grateful one.

Key themes

• Stoic life-survey at mid-career, not deathbed valediction
• Inventory ethics — work, love, art, drink, prayer, and despair all named without ranking
• Constancy of mind as the speaker's earned posture toward whatever comes
• Plain Anglo-Saxon diction as a moral commitment, not a stylistic accident

Notable craft elements

• Three-part rhyme structure (AABB / CDDC / EFEF) that maps the poem's rhetorical movement from snapshot couplets to enveloped reckoning to resolved cross-rhyme
• Mixed-foot, anapestic-leaning meter that reads as talked rhythm rather than the strict iambic march of Invictus
• Anaphoric "I have / I've" structure converting autobiography into a public inventory
• Monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary throughout — the Counter-Decadence register Henley championed against fin-de-siècle ornament

Reread prompt

On a second reading, notice how the rhyme pattern shifts across the poem — couplets in lines 1-4, an envelope quatrain in 5-8, cross-rhyme in 9-12. How does that progression mirror the speaker's movement from snapshot to reckoning to resolution?

Read Full Analysis →