'Darkness'+(1816)

toc =Poem= //I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light: And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones, The palaces of crowned kings--the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd, And men were gather'd round their blazing homes To look once more into each other's face; Happy were those who dwelt within the eye Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch: A fearful hope was all the world contain'd; Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black. The brows of men by the despairing light Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits The flashes fell upon them; some lay down And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd; And others hurried to and fro, and fed Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up With mad disquietude on the dull sky, The pall of a past world; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust, And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd And twin'd themselves among the multitude, Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food. And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again: a meal was bought With blood, and each sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left; All earth was but one thought--and that was death Immediate and inglorious; and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails--men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; The meagre by the meagre were devour'd, Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one, And he was faithful to a corpse, and kept The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay, Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food, But with a piteous and perpetual moan, And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand Which answer'd not with a caress--he died. The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two Of an enormous city did survive, And they were enemies: they met beside The dying embers of an altar-place Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things For an unholy usage; they rak'd up, And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died-- Even of their mutual hideousness they died, Unknowing who he was upon whose brow Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump, Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless-- A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay. The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still, And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd They slept on the abyss without a surge-- The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before; The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air, And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need Of aid from them--She was the Universe.//

=Byron's Writing of "Darkness"= Byron wrote the poem "Darkness" during the year 1816, also known as the "Year Without a Summer." An eruption of Mount Tambora, in what is now Indonesia, had thrown enormous amounts of ash and dust into the upper atmosphere and the resulting climate disturbances had brought strange, unseasonable weather across the globe.

In Europe, The effects were a reduction in sunlight reaching the ground, unusually low temperatures and constant rainfall. Crops across Europe were destroyed by frost and mold, causing one of the last great famines in Western Europe. Many observers, throughout Europe, regarded these occurences as being signs of the end times of the Book of the Revelation of John. For Byron and his friends, on holiday in Switzerland, much time was spent indoors, avoiding the unpleasant weather. This restriction from outdoor pursuits brought a number of important works out of the assembled vacationers, as detailed in 'Fragment of a Novel' and the Birth of Modern Horror.

Clearly, these events had an effect on Byron, beyond the immediate effect on his holiday and "Darkness," was published in this same time frame.

=Analysis= Byron's "Darkness" is a morbid and bleak apocalypse, detailing a world that has come to lifelessness and desolation, not it fire and destruction, but in a cold, inevitable dying of all light.

The poem is a single, unbroken segment, not broken into stanzas, and, like much of Byron's work, is written in blank verse, with a regular meter but no rhyme. There are individual lines that utilize rhyming ("Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless...").

The imagery of the poem is strong, almost oppressive and extremely bleak. Byron uses a series of vignettes to show the world that we recognize grinding to a halt and uses hammer-blunt examples to wring all light from the poem, just as all light has left the world in his imaging. The last faithful dog on earth lies by its master, defending it from carrion-eaters, until death claims it with a whine (see 'Epitaph to a Dog' (1808) for possible associations). The last two survivors of a great city are, at the last, described as enemies, burning holy items for fuel and finally dying of shock upon seeing the others' emaciated face.

Although Byron probably could not have fashioned the poem as any kind of ecological statement, the idea would have been extraordinary science-fiction for his situation, especially as he was writing high in the Alps, the poem can be interpreted thus in modern reading. Humanity burns every last scrap of wood and organic material in a doomed effort to stave off the darkness of death, and the setting could be imagined as an ultra-polluted world or a planet in nuclear winter.