Byron's Upside-Down Apocalypse

Brughel, The Tower of Babel

Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates

There are already a few posts about “Darkness,” but it’s been a rough and very weird day wherein many students, myself included, were locked in dark windowless places during one of the most beautiful light-filled days of the semester. So perhaps this is especially relevant and too close to home at the moment.

Coming off the fanciful dream-imaginings and flirtations with Death involved in reading Keats, I was struck in reading Byron’s “Darkness,” which so ominously begins: “I had a dream, which was not at a dream” (1). Keats’ romantic vision of a waking dream end, albeit his own individual ending, is immediately swept away with the speaker of this poem proclaiming: “All earth was but one thought — and that was death, / Immediate and inglorious” (42-43). Any poem-painting of an end-times even broaching on the baroque seems impossible here. This is not Jacques-Louis David’s depiction of the death of Socrates, but instead a Babel painting by Brueghel, elaborate, surely, though muted and ominous in its twisting lines and lack of human figures.

And this is different than most end-times stories. The lion and the lamb lay down, sort of: “The wildest brutes / Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d / And twined themselves among the multitude, / Hissing, but stingless — they were slain for food” (34-37). The paradoxes multiple but remain less than startling and “stingless.”

My favorite lines involve the upside-down mountain of the volcano, which becomes a place of refuge instead of Pompey-horror: “Happy were those who dwelt within the eye / Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch: / A fearful hope was all the world contain’d” (16-18). In the end, not only does everything somehow become its opposite, but what once represented doom transforms into a “fearful hope.”

This poem also provoked the question, for me, regarding how one writes about nothingness. Or a fantastical space – the future, the death of the universe – as non-fantastical, i.e. the “chaos of hard clay”? (72). Another work that I think does this trick especially well is Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, where nothing really happens in a desolate atom-bombed landscape for hundreds of pages, and yet an artwork is produced. It is a dream suspended dreamless, all hard stuff lumped at the bottom.

I don’t have much else to comment on this poem at the moment, but I appreciated the other posts on it and I look forward to Kathleen’s presentation tomorrow! I liked Addie’s idea of Byron “captur[ing] the end of humanity by honing in on the small characteristics that make us human,” even though I read the poem as distinctly humanless. Perhaps this is a more hopeful reading of the poem; something that makes “Darkness” light.