Lord
Byron
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 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 consumed,
And men were gathered 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;
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 smiled;
And others hurried to and
fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with
fuel, and looked 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 tremolous; and vipers crawl'd
And twined 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 devoured,
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
Lured their lank jaws;
himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and
perpetual moan
And a quick desolate cry,
licking the hand
Which answered 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
raked up,
And shivering scraped with
their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes,
and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and
made a flame
Wich 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
stood still,
And nothing stirred 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
expired before;
The winds were withered in
the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them - She was
the universe.
Source:
http://www.online-literature.com/byron/685/
The idea of the poem is horror, desolation,
individuality. Reading this poem it seems to be dying, alone with no one to
help you. You are alone in this terrifying world, where everyone is your enemy,
and you should fight to survive. The poem transmits misery, sadness, there are
no elements of happiness, and all is dark, there is no light, no life in the
poem. All in the poem is dying, losing vitality, losing life.
The form of
the poem seems to be easy to read, but it is difficult, because there are no
spaces, there are no stanzas. The entire poem is a text without stops. It
consists in eighty-two verses without spaces, there are no stanzas. It has a
structured form. All the verses have ten syllables, or almost all, but the
sentences do not coincide with the verses. Sometimes sentences are divided, the
beginning of the sentence is in one verse, and the end of the sentence is in
the next verse, so that makes the reading a little bit difficult. There are a
lot of abbreviations to make verses of ten syllables. For example, in line 2: EXTINGUISH’D;
in line 18: CONTAIN’D; GNASH’D and SHRIEK’D in line 32; CRAWL’D in line 35; in
lines 49 and 55: FAMISH’D; in line 59 HEAP’D; PROPP’D in line 76; and PERISH’D
in line 81. All these abbreviations make verses of ten syllables.
That poem is too long, and it is
hard to read because of the density of vocabulary.
The title of this poem makes the
reader think about fears, scaring things or frightening ones. It is because of
darkness is related to the dark colour, and for most
of the people this colour implies thinking on death
or on horror thoughts, nightmares, one’s fears and bad experiences of life. So,
only reading the title you think about the worst things you could imagine.
Obscure colours are connected to death, and related to witchcraft. Most of the
people connect the dark or obscure colours with terrifying episodes of their
lives. Always, dark has been related to terror.
The word DARKNESS appears only
once in the poem. It is in line 81, and here there is a personification. The
poet says: “Darkness had no need of aid from them – she was the universe”.
There is the
only reference on female gender through the entire poem. This had been written
by the poet on purpose. The poet, here, is comparing females with universe, and
saying she is behind all bad phenomenons in the
world. There are deaths in the world because she is the universe, and she has
control.
The verbs are written in past
tenses. The poet combines past simple, present perfect and past perfect, and
there are five times where the poet writes an affirmative sentence but using
the auxiliary verb in the past form: DID, and the root of the main verb. Those
are: DID WANDER, in line 3; DID LIVE, in line 10; DID REST, in line 25; DID
GLUT, in line 39; and DID SURVIVE, in line 56.
We can relate
most of the verbs of this poem to death, some examples are EXTINGUISH’D, WERE
BURNT, WERE CONSUMED, FELL, FADED, WERE SLAIN, WERE DEVORED, and DIED, WAS
VOID, LAY, FELL DOWN, WERE DEAD or HAD EXPIRED are verbs which are directly
related to death.
The first effect on me, the
reader, is a sense of frustration, of having no solution for the world
presented by the poet in this poem, a world of death and obscurantism, with
corpses, with empty spaces and with no elements of life or survival.
Focusing on semantics, there are
a lot of words related to death and the end of life, the end of human life,
PALL and CURSES, for example. Other words like PANG, BONES, TOMBLESS, BEASTS,
FAMISH’D MEN, or COLD SKELETON HANDS are some that come from the semantic field
of death.
But after reading again and
again the poem, I realized that there is one sentence, the first sentence of
the poem, where the poet writes in first person: “I had a dream, which was not
all a dream”. In this sentence the poet is saying that what he is writing could
be a dream, maybe a nightmare, but it is the cruel reality.
I would lie if I say I enjoyed
the poem, because it is full of death and fear. I felt sad when reading it,
because I think the poet is describing the real world, and that world could be
our world.