Word: invictus
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...people in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995; by lethal injection; in Terre Haute, Ind. McVeigh spent his last day writing to friends, napping and eating a final meal of mint chocolate-chip ice cream. McVeigh made no final statement, offering instead a handwritten copy of the 1875 poem "Invictus." He was the first person executed by the Federal Government in 38 years...
...accounts he was calm. He looked in the eyes of the witnesses - the media, his lawyers, and those whose lives he had forever and horrifically altered. He gave no statement, but he had copied out "Invictus," William Ernest Henley's ode to Victorian conquest, which contains the famous line, "I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul...
...past history have. He just looked like a man who was enacting a campaign rather than waging it. And I stood in the back of the hall and thought, He's losing with grace because losing is something he knows how to do. I thought of the old poem Invictus...
...think that's how he saw himself at the end. Invictus, one of F.D.R.'s favorite poems, was popular in the storm-tossed 1940s and would have been known to a lieutenant named Dole. It is a poem about fierce human will, a poem you might call proud or braying, depending on your taste. And you could say the Dole campaign at the end was a similar kind of poem...
...cell, but he seems to have willed a diminished appearance in order to stay in proportion with his furnishings. Most of these hang on the walls: a chain of beads, a pair of sunglasses, snapshots of his three children. He has copied William Ernest Henley's poem "Invictus" by hand and mounted it with cellophane tape. There is a picture postcard of a sailboat at sunset below what Sy calls his "mind stimulators," words of advice on how best to study: SURVEY, QUESTION, READ, REVIEW, RECITE. Between the postcard and the sunglasses lies a poetic formula: "You imagine what...