Day 5 of ‘A Scare a Day’ – ‘Darkness’ by Lord Byron

At the moment, I’m working as a Research Fellow at Nottingham University on a Byron project and am based at Newstead Abbey (Byron’s ancestral home) so it was inevitable that Byron was going to find his way into this year’s list. Today we’re reading his relatively short poem Darkness which you can read here and which you listen to here (I made you a recording!)

When people think Byron, they often think ‘Byronic hero’ and may leap straight to his longer narrative poems like Childe Harold or Don Juan or his tales of striking and tortured outsiders like The Corsair, The Giaour, or Manfred. ‘Darkness’ offers us something a little different and perhaps unexpected! I’ve found that this poem often acts as a Byron gateway or ends up as people’s favourite when they find it. I’m interested to hear what you think!

Darkness is an apocalyptic poem about a world thrust into darkness. It tracks the trajectory of despair with a world burning itself down to preserve the last ‘mockery’ of light. It’s a world that becomes glutted with blood. ‘No love was left’, just famished bodies and people desperate enough to destroy each other and everything they hold sacred in a failed attempt to survive. There’s plenty of stark and memorable imagery. A couple of lines that stuck with me today were:

The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths

There’s something particularly horrific about this image, whether it’s the stillness of that which is usually in perpetual motion or the loss of life that we never normally see. The sense that everything is lost, not just what we are used to see, hear or perceive around us. Everything. However far you go, however deep, there is nothing. As Byron says at the end of the poem ‘Darkness is the universe’.

The poem itself was written in 1816 and it was published alongside ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ – another incredibly harrowing poem. You can read it here. Inspired by a trip taken by Byron and Percy Shelley, this poem was inspired by the real story of Francois Bonivard, a political prisoner who was confined in the Castle of Chillon for 6 years, 4 of which were spent underground. Byron takes what you might call ‘enormous liberties’ with the story, giving us a fictional prisoner of Chillon loosely inspired on Bonivard. The poem is a haunting account of psychological and physical trauma.

There are two particularly significant things about the date of ‘Darkness’s composition. First, 1816 was the ‘year without a summer’ and Byron was inspired by this real life event. It was due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia spewing volcanic ash leading to unusual darkness, poor weather, storms, sulphurous sunsets and cold temperatures across Europe. This wasn’t actually known at the time and the events caused some degree of panic with the darkness being blamed on sunspots. Things weren’t helped by the ‘Bologna prophecy’. An anonymous Italian scholar predicted that the world would end on July 16th as the sunspots engulfed the sun. Byron’s poem can be read as an imaginative exercise which draws on contemporary fears and the experience of a ‘summerless’ year of seemingly endless darkness.

The second salient fact about the year 1816 is that this is the year where Byron left (was forced to leave) England. His letters testify to the despair that frequently assailed him and the experience of being figuratively (rather than the more literal version in the poem) torn to shreds by public opinion would have been fresh in his mind. Under these circumstances, the despairing and desperate tone of the poem seems somewhat inevitable.

I can’t be sure about the dog reference in the poem but there is an oddly large number of lines dedicated to it. It’s hard not to associate this with Byron’s relationship with animals and particularly his beloved dog Boatswain who had died of rabies in 1808. Byron’s epitaph to his dog, which you can read here, makes his feelings on the relative merits of humans and dogs clear. See the short extract below:

When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth,
Unknown to Glory but upheld by Birth,
The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below:
When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen
Not what he was, but what he should have been.
But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth,
Deny’d in heaven the Soul he held on earth

The epitaph appears on the monument to Boatswain in the grounds of Newstead Abbey. Byron’s will of 1811 asked for his body to be buried with that of his dog, but his wish had to be changed after he sold the abbey. The depiction in ‘Darkness’ of a dog who simply will not hurt his master is reminiscent of Byron’s account of Boatswain’s own death who, even to the last, despite suffering from rabies, never hurt Byron, who cared for him in his final moments.

That’s enough about the context, I think. I hope you found those little details interesting! We often assume that post-apocalyptic fiction and dystopias are quite a modern thing but not so! If you’re interested in other contemporary apocalyptic accounts you might enjoy Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. It’s a tale of a world decimated by plague.