Poem of the week: Darkness by Lord Byron

If you’d like a reminder that things could always be worse, this poem is it. Brace yourself for the worst of all possible worlds: Darkness is a horrifying vision of humanity’s last days, a thrilling piece of apocalyptic sci-fi unlike anything else in the canon of Romantic poetry. I must have read it a hundred times, and it still gives me goosebumps.

It starts with one of the all-time-great opening lines – “I had a dream, which was not all a dream” – setting the tone for the nightmare vision that follows. What if “the bright sun was extinguish’d”, leaving mankind to shiver and perish, alone in a godless universe?

It’s an irresistible, spine-tingling premise. If George Gordon, Lord Byron, had written this poem today, he would probably have pitched the rights to Netflix. This kind of high-concept, high-stakes scenario would make for a gripping box-set – if the answer to that “what if” weren’t so inescapably bleak.

Darkness is not a flawless poem. It’s on the long side, and its gothic excess runs the risk of becoming unintentionally funny. By the last few lines, the relentless litany of destruction is starting to loose its oomph. (“The world was void,/ The populous and the powerful was a lump [...] a lump of death” – yes, we get it, George.) And yet what makes it so impressive is the way Byron sustains and varies his vision, exploring every aspect of his doomed, dog-eat-dog world (volcanoes! snakes! ransacked churches!) as he mounts horror upon horror.

What inspired it? A damp squib of a holiday. In fact, the most influential rainy summer holiday in the history of English literature. Byron wrote this poem in mid-1816, known as “The Year Without a Summer”. Temperatures plummeted, crops failed, and at Byron’s villa near Lake Geneva – where he was staying at the time with his doctor, John Polidori – the weather was consistently foul.

There, he made friends with a holidaying couple staying nearby, Percy and Mary Shelley. They would come to his villa and read chilling tales. One evening, when Byron read aloud from Coleridge’s gothic poem Christabel, poor Percy ran screaming from the room. You might find an echo of Coleridge in this poem: Byron’s “Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea” surely owes a debt to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

One June evening, while a thunder-storm raged outside, he famously challenged his companions to each write a ghost story. In a sense, they failed: their efforts weren’t technically about ghosts. But in all other respects the parlour-game was an extraordinary success.

In response to the challenge, Mary Shelley, still a teenager, began writing her masterpiece Frankenstein; Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the first modern vampire story, reimagining the bloodsucking creature as a handsome but pale aristocrat rather like his employer.

Byron’s Darkness may have been written some weeks later, but I see it as the third part of this horror triptych: it is the first great post-apocalyptic thriller.

Darkness

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 corse, 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.