The Full Text of “Darkness”
1I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
2The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
3Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
4Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
5Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
6Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
7And men forgot their passions in the dread
8Of this their desolation; and all hearts
9Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
10And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
11The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
12The habitations of all things which dwell,
13Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
14And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
15To look once more into each other's face;
16Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
17Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
18A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
19Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
20They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
21Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.
22The brows of men by the despairing light
23Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
24The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
25And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
26Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
27And others hurried to and fro, and fed
28Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
29With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
30The pall of a past world; and then again
31With curses cast them down upon the dust,
32And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd
33And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
34And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
35Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
36And twin'd themselves among the multitude,
37Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
38And War, which for a moment was no more,
39Did glut himself again;—a meal was bought
40With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
41Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
42All earth was but one thought—and that was death,
43Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
44Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
45Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
46The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
47Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
48And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
49The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
50Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
51Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
52But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
53And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
54Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.
55The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
56Of an enormous city did survive,
57And they were enemies: they met beside
58The dying embers of an altar-place
59Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
60For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,
61And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands
62The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
63Blew for a little life, and made a flame
64Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
65Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
66Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—
67Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
68Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
69Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
70The populous and the powerful—was a lump,
71Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
72A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
73The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
74And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
75Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
76And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
77They slept on the abyss without a surge—
78The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
79The moon, their mistress, had expired before;
80The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
81And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
82Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
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“Darkness” Introduction
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"Darkness" is Lord Byron's terrible tale of apocalypse and despair. In this narrative poem, a speaker dreams of a future in which the sun burns out and the whole world is left in darkness. Panicking, the survivors of this catastrophe gradually destroy all remaining life in their efforts to survive. Humanity, this poem suggests, is at the mercy of a vast and uncaring universe—and its own dark, selfish, violent impulses. This poem first appeared in Byron's 1816 collection The Prisoner of Chillon.
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“Darkness” Summary
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I had a dream—but I don't think it was just a dream. In my dream, the sun went out, and the stars wandered through an infinite blackness, without light or direction. The frozen earth moved helplessly through the darkness, without even the moon for a guide. Morning came and went, but didn't bring daylight with it.
In the midst of all this misery, humanity forgot how to feel: everyone's heart froze, and people were unable to do anything but pray selfishly that light would come back. They saw by the light of little fires—and slowly began to burn every building they could find, from kings' thrones to peasants' huts to entire cities. Finally, people crowded around their own burning houses just to see each other in the light of the fires. People who lived close to volcanoes were considered lucky: they could see by the light of the mountains' fires.
There were no feelings in the world but a terrified kind of hope. People began to set the forests on fire, but they quickly burned out; the last trunks fell to the ground, and there was no light left at all. In the last flickers of the firelight, people's faces looked eerie and strange. Some people lay down on the ground to cry helplessly, while some just hunkered down and smiled awful smiles. Meanwhile, other people scurried around, trying to burn the corpses of the dead, and looking up uneasily at the dark sky, which looked like the coffin cover of the dead earth. Eventually, though, they'd always give up and throw themselves on the ground to curse, grind their teeth, and weep.
Meanwhile, the birds cried out, and flailed around on the ground in terror, unable to fly. Even the most vicious animals became shaky and frightened. Snakes crawled hissing through the crowds, but didn't even bite anyone, they were so disoriented; people killed them and ate them.
And War, which had paused for a moment, began to feast on humanity again. People killed each other for food and ate alone in sullen silence. There was no such thing as love anymore: all that anyone could feel was a longing for a swift and humble death. As everyone got hungrier and hungrier, the picked-over bones of the dead lay out in the open; one scrawny, starving person ate another.
Even the dogs began to attack their masters—all but one of them, who remained faithful even to his master's dead body. He drove away all the animals and starving people who tried to eat the corpse, until they fell dead from hunger or went hunting for some other body to eat. The loyal dog himself didn't eat anything: he just whined pitifully, until he gave a final, sorrowful bark, licked his master's unresponsive hand, and died.
Bit by bit, everyone on earth starved except for two people, the last survivors from a whole huge city. This pair happened to be enemies. They ran into each other next to the ashes of a temple, where sacred objects had been piled up and burned. They scraped the last embers of this fire together with their bony hands and used the last of their weak breath to start a tiny, pathetic fire. In that fire's light, they looked at each other, saw each other's faces, and died immediately from shock over each other's horrific ugliness. They had both become so horrible to look at that they didn't even recognize each other: they only saw the faces of starved devils.
Finally, the world had come to nothing. A planet that had bustled with life and power was just a mass of dirt, without seasons, plants, trees, people, or life. It was only a dead lump of baked earth. All the world's waters became stagnant and motionless, with nothing alive even in their deepest places; empty ships slowly decomposed on the water, and their masts toppled into the water where they, too, lay still, unmoved by waves. There were no more waves and no more tides, because the moon, who controls these forces, had died long ago. The winds shriveled up in the still air, and the clouds died. Darkness didn't need their help, anyway: she was all that existed in the entire universe.
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“Darkness” Themes
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Human Greed and Selfishness
In Byron’s “Darkness,” the speaker dreams a terrible dream in which humanity rips itself to shreds after the sun burns out and leaves the world without light. Desperate and starving in an eternal night, the survivors of this disaster almost immediately turn to murder and cannibalism. The real horror of this apocalypse, the poem suggests, isn’t just the literal darkness of a sunless world. It’s the metaphorical darkness inside people’s souls: the greed, violence, and selfishness lurking just beneath civilized surfaces, ready to emerge the moment that people feel that their own survival is threatened.
In the speaker’s dream, when the sun burns out, society breaks down almost immediately. As people start to get hungry in a world where crops no longer grow, chaotic warfare breaks out. People desperately slaughter whatever (and whoever) they can get their hands on, “gorging” on everything from “vipers” to human corpses just to keep themselves alive. What’s more, they hoard what little food they can find, sitting “apart” from each other and jealously defending their own turf. This instinctive, selfish will to live at any cost, the poem suggests, is never really too far away: people will turn on each other in a heartbeat to preserve their own lives.
Human greed and selfishness ruins not just lives, but the environment. Running out of fuel, the survivors set all the world’s buildings forests on fire for the sake of some temporary light and warmth. As soon as people feel endangered, the poem suggests, they’ll speedily destroy everything around them as they scramble to survive.
It’s only fitting, then, that the last two people on earth—old “enemies”—die together, not in a fight, but in sheer horror at the sight of each other’s shriveled, devilish faces. The end of the world has exposed the “fiend[ish]” evil barely contained by civilization—and that recognition is too much for anyone to bear.
And the fact that the whole poem takes place in the speaker’s “dream” suggests that the speaker recognizes just this kind of evil and selfishness inside themselves. The real horror, this poem suggests, isn’t so much any external apocalypse, but the terrible “darkness” that lurks in every person.
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Human Weakness and the Fragility of Civilization
“Darkness” makes a stark, uncompromising point about humanity’s ultimate powerlessness. In the speaker’s dream of a postapocalyptic planet under a burnt-out sun, not one human institution, from monarchy to religion, survives the great “darkness.” Civilization, this poem suggests, is much more fragile than anyone would like to believe; the vast emptiness of the universe will eventually defeat all human powers.
Almost as soon as the sun goes out in the poem, humanity has to reckon with its weakness and vulnerability. Without the sun, people are forced to burn their own homes for heat and light—an image that symbolizes the total collapse of civilization. Notably, even the “thrones” of kings and the “holy” relics of temples aren’t spared. Even grand human institutions like monarchies and religions, the poem suggests, are actually powerless in the grand scheme of things.
Human dignity, like civilization, also crumbles almost immediately under the pressure of starvation and desperation. Under the burnt-out sun, the people in this poem become mere animals, attacking each other to survive: starving, the “meagre” devour the “meagre” as indiscriminately as hyenas. In fact, people become worse than animals. All of humanity proves itself less loyal and constant than one faithful dog, who defends his master’s corpse from scavengers until he too dies of hunger.
What’s more, all human attempts to regain power ultimately play right into the hands of the “darkness.” When, for instance, humanity torches the world’s forests for the sake of some temporary warmth, they only leave the earth even more “lifeless” than it already was.
Ultimately, the poem suggests, “Darkness” is the very substance of the “Universe.” The infinite, lightless emptiness of the cosmos will always swallow up and defeat even the most awe-inspiring human powers—and people forget just how small and powerless they really are at their own peril.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Darkness”
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Lines 1-5
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;The poem's speaker begins with an ominous warning: the terrible "dream" they're about to recount "was not all a dream." In other words, this dream's "Darkness," in this speaker's view, isn't just a nightmare, but a revelation of terrible truths. This will be a poem about the darkness that lurks just under society's civilized surfaces.
The poem's form underlines the speaker's claim to a kind of prophetic seriousness. Written in grand, rumbling blank verse—that is, lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter—"Darkness" takes the same shape as, for example, Milton's Paradise Lost, another tale of humanity's doom (though a considerably less bleak one).
As the speaker's dream begins, the sun itself has burnt out for no apparent reason, leaving the earth bereft, lifeless, and dark. Take a look at the speaker's language here:
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;That first line delivers a catastrophe in just a few words. Without explanation or warning, the sun is simply "extinguish'd," gone for good. The speaker's vivid imagery here invites readers to imagine a world without light through their sense of touch as well as sight: not just "darkling," but "icy," frozen and lifeless. And the personification of the stars as aimless "wander[ers]" and the earth as "blind" makes it feel as if the sudden darkness leaves the whole universe stunned, lost, and helpless.
The intense emotion of these first lines—and the fact that this tale is framed as a dream—suggests that the speaker is considering a more than literal darkness here. The rest of the poem will explore a world of symbolic darknesses: the darkness of an infinite and uncaring universe, and the darkness of human nature.
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Lines 6-9
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:
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Lines 10-15
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; -
Lines 16-21
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. -
Lines 22-26
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; -
Lines 27-32
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: -
Lines 32-37
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. -
Lines 38-41
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; -
Lines 42-46
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, -
Lines 47-54
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. -
Lines 55-64
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; -
Lines 64-69
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. -
Lines 69-72
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. -
Lines 73-77
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— -
Lines 78-81
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; -
Lines 81-82
Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
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“Darkness” Symbols
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Darkness
The poem's terrible, apocalyptic darkness can be read as a symbol of blind instinct, evil, death, and hopelessness.
The poem begins with the sun going out and leaving the whole world "darkling." In this darkness, people begin to attack each other like animals—a vision that suggests it's only the "light" of reason that keeps humanity from reverting to its brutal nature. The outer darkness, in this reading, is a manifestation of humanity's inner darkness: its cruelty, selfishness, and greed.
By the end of the poem, it's not just the world that's in the dark: the universe itself is a personified "Darkness," a terrible goddess. This idea reflects a pretty bleak worldview, a picture of a cosmos in which death and emptiness eventually and inevitably swallow up all life and meaning.
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The Dog
The dog in lines 47-54 symbolizes loyalty, friendship, and love—qualities that, alas, can't outlast the terrible "darkness."
Lord Byron was a dog-lover all his life, and sometimes spoke of trusting dogs far more than people. It's no coincidence, then, that a loyal pooch is the only caring figure in this entire poem. As the rest of the world rips itself to shreds, this dog defends its master's rotting corpse against all scavengers. Alas, this good boy, too, dies of hunger in the end.
This dog's heroic-but-tragic story thus represents the doom of all goodness in a cruel world.
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“Darkness” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
Horrific imagery forms this poem's backbone. By submerging readers in a nightmarish vision of a world without a sun, the speaker insists on a confrontation with humanity's dark side.
Much of the imagery here evokes the sheer physical terror of complete darkness. Take these early lines, for example:
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;The images of the dark here present it as an assault on the senses of both sight and touch: the earth without the sun becomes both "icy" and "blind," frozen and groping through the void of space. And the word "bright" in line 2 is the only truly luminous word in the whole poem: all the later fires only "blaze" and "flash" briefly before fading into dull embers.
Imagery also won't let readers look away from the misery of the survivors on the lightless earth:
[...] the wild birds shriek'd
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings [...]The imagery here (underlined by the onomatopoeia of "shriek'd," "flutter," and "flap") stabs readers with pity for the helpless, panicking birds. It's as if, everywhere one turns, one can hear the screams of dying animals.
And by the end of the poem, when all life is finally extinguished, the speaker's imagery evokes complete nothingness. The world becomes a mere "lump of death—a chaos of hard clay." That "hard clay" feels cold, unforgiving, and deadly; speakers can almost feel the impact as this lifeless "lump" hits the poem.
All this imagery doesn't just help readers to feel what it would be like to live in a dying world. It also underlines the poem's bigger metaphorical point: that the inner "darkness" of evil, selfishness, greed, and despair are never really that far from the surface. Imagery makes the consequences of human evil concrete.
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Personification
Unlock all 296 words of this analysis of Personification in “Darkness,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Onomatopoeia
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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Repetition
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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“Darkness” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Darkling
- Rayless, and pathless
- Passions
- Desolation
- Watchfires
- Consum'd
- Mountain-torch
- Aspect
- By fits
- Disquietude
- Pall
- Gnash'd
- Brutes
- Tremulous
- Vipers
- Twin'd
- Stingless
- Glut
- Sate
- Gorging
- Inglorious
- The pang of famine fed upon all entrails
- Meagre
- Assail'd
- Corse
- Famish'd
- Clung
- Lank
- Beheld
- Fiend
- Herbless
- Piecemeal
- Abyss
- Surge
- Stagnant
Darkling-
In the dark.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Darkness”
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Form
"Darkness" is written in one long, continuous stanza: 82 lines of blank verse.
Blank verse—lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter—is a flexible, dramatic, and popular form. It's most famous from the great plays and narrative poems of Shakespeare and Milton: because blank verse poems can go on just as long as the author cares to string them out, it's great for telling stories.
That's likely why Byron chose this form for his terrible tale. This long, hypnotic, relentless stanza has the quality of a nightmare one just can't wake up from.
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Meter
"Darkness" is written in rumbling blank verse. That means that it doesn't use a rhyme scheme, but does use a consistent meter: iambic pentameter. In other words, every line contains five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 1:
I had | a dream, | which was | not all | a dream.
This is a form with a grand history. Both Shakespeare and Milton often wrote in blank verse. In writing this poem, Byron might well have been thinking of Milton's Paradise Lost, with its terrifying descriptions of Hell's "darkness visible."
As in many blank verse poems, the iambic pentameter doesn't remain perfectly constant here; the speaker often varies the rhythm for effect. Take this grim description of the earth after the last people die, for instance, lines 71-72:
Seasonless, | herbless, | treeless, | manless, | lifeless—
A lump | of death— | a cha- | os of | hard clay.In this relentless passage, the speaker first switches from iambs to trochees—the opposite foot, with a DUM-da rhythm—and even uses an initial dactyl, a foot with a DUM-da-da rhythm. Then, line 72 starts out with a familiar iambic rhythm, but lands on a hard spondee—two stresses in a row, DUM-DUM. The overall effect is shocking, striking, and harsh—only appropriate, considering what the speaker is describing.
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Rhyme Scheme
Since "Darkness" is written in blank verse, it doesn't use a rhyme scheme. But it does introduce spots of internal rhyme, alliteration, and other sonic devices to create its macabre effects.
For instance, listen to the patterns of sound in lines 50-51:
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur'd their lank jaws; [...]Here, the near-rhyme of "hunger" and "clung" evokes the brutish grunts of the starving crowds. And the alliterative /d/ and /l/ sounds land as heavily as blows. There might not be full rhymes here, but these sounds give the poem its own kind of grim music.
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“Darkness” Speaker
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The reader learns very little about the poem's speaker. They make their one and only appearance in the very first line, introducing their "dream." This dream sounds more like a nightmare, and it suggests that the speaker is deeply troubled. Perhaps they're not just worried about humanity's propensity for cruelty and greed, or terrified of natural disasters, but uneasy about how much evil might lurk in their own hearts: read metaphorically, this poem might express the speaker's own despair, fear, and cruelty.
For the most part, though, this poem's speaker is less a character and more a storyteller.
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“Darkness” Setting
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The poem is set in a dystopian version of Earth, in a time after the sun has burnt out and left the world in the cold and the dark. In this terrible blackness, lit only by fading "watchfire[s]," the red "mountain-torch[es]" of volcanoes, and counterproductive forest fires, humans and animals writhe, brawl, and bite, struggling to survive. All that violence and cruelty only ends when the last two remaining humans die of shock at the sight of each other's shriveled, "fiend[ish]" faces.
In short: this poem is set in the grimmest, most apocalyptic vision of the future one could possibly devise! The only kernel of hope here appears in the form of a loyal dog, who starves to death defending his master's corpse from scavengers.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Darkness”
Literary Context
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) might have had complicated feelings about his posthumous reputation as the very icon of Romanticism. Byron didn't think much of most of the other poets readers now class as Romantics: he felt a lordly disdain for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, seeing himself more as the descendent of witty, caustic Enlightenment writers like Alexander Pope. Besides, he much preferred to think of himself as one of a kind—and the world was eager to agree.
Byron is often considered the first modern celebrity. A dashing young lord, as famous for his scandalous love affairs as for his poetry, he was a literal pinup: young men and women sighed over tinted prints of his portrait. He was the model for the "Byronic hero," a passionate, tormented, idealistic figure with a self-destructive streak. One of his many, many lovers, Caroline Lamb, famously described him as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"—an opinion she probably didn't revise when he summarily dumped her.
But Byron was much more than his celebrity or his passions. He was an innovative (and often very funny) poet, whose close friendship with Mary and Percy Shelley was a source of inspiration for them all. And he was a man of conviction: he died in the Greek War of Independence, a conflict he joined out of sheer idealism. As this poem reflects, he even had a softer side: he was a lifelong dog-lover, and built his beloved dog Boatswain a grand tomb, decorated with a tribute poem.
And, whether he liked it or not, Byron was also a textbook Romantic—a writer moving away from 18th-century literary ideals of order, rationality, and clarity, and into a kind of poetry founded on deep, stormy feeling. This poem in particular reflects a Romantic interest in both the uncontrollable human "passions" and the awe-inspiring, mysterious, and terrifying "darkness" of the universe.
It's hard to overstate Byron's impact on the world of art and literature. A major inspiration to writers from Alexander Pushkin to Emily Brontë, he continues to influence all kinds of art to this day.
Historical Context
Byron wrote "Darkness" during 1816, the infamous "Year Without a Summer." This dark period began with the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia. The vast clouds of ash and smoke the volcano spewed into the atmosphere deflected sunlight, creating a worldwide "volcanic winter": the weather became chilly and gloomy, crops failed, and sunsets were stained an eerie red. Perhaps worst of all, nobody really understood exactly why this was happening; many began to harbor bleak thoughts about the end of the world.
Those thoughts would have fit right in with the English Romantic poets' concerns about what was happening to nature and society in the 19th century. As the Industrial Revolution kicked into gear, English rural life began to wane; people moved into cities and made their livings in dangerous, dirty factories. The Romantics worried that this kind of progress severed people from nature's wisdom and beauty—and, in particular, that humanity might well bite off more than it could chew through all this rapid development and change.
It's also worth noting that Byron's apocalyptic vision is only one of the many works to respond to this period: the Year Without a Summer influenced everything from paintings to music. In fact, Byron wrote "Darkness" on the very same legendary holiday that inspired easily the most famous of that dark year's artworks: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
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More “Darkness” Resources
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External Resources
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Byron the Bad Boy — Read an article about Byron's complex legacy as a major poet, an iconoclast, and a celebrity.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a dramatic reading of the poem.
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A Short Biography — Visit the Poetry Foundation to learn more about Byron's life and work.
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The Year Without a Summer — Read about the dark, cold summer of 1816, which inspired not only this poem, but a number of major works of literature, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
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Byron and Dogs — Learn about Byron's special fondness for dogs, and especially his beloved Lyon, who has a cameo in this poem as the lone representative of loyalty and hope!
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Lord Byron
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