Getting Started With Out Of The Night That Covers Me
The poem "Out of the Night that Covers Me" by Edwin Arlington Robinson is one of the most quoted pieces of American poetry from the late 19th century. It's short—four quatrains—and the last two lines are probably familiar to anyone who's been to a graduation or watched a dramatic movie. But if you're trying to use it, cite it, or just understand what Robinson was actually doing with it, there are some details people routinely get wrong. I ran into this when I was editing an anthology section where someone had attributed the final couplet to Martin Luther King Jr. because he quoted it in "Nonviolent Resistance." The poem is public domain, sure, but getting the source right matters. Robinson wrote it in 1897. It first appeared in his collection called The Children of the Night. That's the primary source. Anything else is secondary at best.
Where to Find a Reliable Text of Out Of The Night That Covers Me
The poem itself is simple to locate, but most online versions have errors. I've seen "black as the pit" swapped for "gloomy as the night," commas in wrong places, and sometimes entire lines dropped. The safest approach is to go straight to the original 1897 text from the Charles Scribner's Sons publication. You can find digitized copies through the Library of Congress website or HathiTrust. Both are free and don't require an account. Project Gutenberg also has it, but their text sometimes gets cleaned up too aggressively. Robinson's punctuation is deliberate—the semicolons and dashes carry rhythm. If you're using this for anything academic, don't rely on a random poetry blog. Go to the archive or the library site. I made that mistake early on and ended up citing a version with a misprinted line break that changed the meter entirely. The full text, correctly punctuated, runs like this:
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. 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.
Get the Full Details
The structure is three quatrains with an ABAB rhyme scheme, written in iambic tetrameter. That last line is the one everyone remembers. It's also the one people misquote most often. It's "I am the captain of my soul," not "I am the captain of my destiny" or any of the variations you'll see on postcards and tattoos. One thing that trips people up is the biblical allusion in the third stanza. "Strait the gate" and "charged with punishments the scroll" are direct references to Matthew 7:13-14 and the Book of Revelation. Robinson isn't being optimistic here in a straightforward way. The poem is often read as pure triumph, but the speaker is describing a situation where he's been beaten—"head is bloody"—and is still standing. That's different from saying everything is fine. The tone is harder than most readings give it credit for. If you're looking to download a clean version for your own use, the best option is the Public Review copy held by the Boston Public Library, which is freely available through their digital collections. The scan quality is decent and the text matches the original typography. There's also the full-text searchable version on the Academy of American Poets website, though you'll need to double-check any citations against the printed original if you're using it formally.
The poem's been set to music several times, referenced in legal proceedings, and quoted in speeches across multiple countries. Its reach is wider than most of Robinson's other work, which is interesting because he was a much more complex poet than this one poem suggests. If you only know Robinson through these four stanzas, you're missing most of what he actually did. But for what it is, this poem is precise and effective, and getting the text right is the least you can do when you're working with it.
