“DARKNESS” NOWADAYS INFLUENCE
Nowadays we can look at “Darkness” as a kind of prophecy about what can
happen if the humanity continues this way, with all
of the wars, the
contamination and the global warming or our behaviour in general.
I think this is like some kind of eternal poem that can be applied like a critical view
of the society in whichever time. The past, the present or the future are times in
which the humanity are taking the world to an end, the world is
constantly ending
by the humans actions.
In Byron’s time people thought that the apocalypse was very near, they saw
evidences of the end everywhere, they were absolutely convinced about the
irremediable coming of the end of times, and, almost two hundred years after, we
are thinking the same.
In this paper I am going to analyse the Lord Byron’s poem called “Darkness”
(published in 1816) through different aspects as
the subject, the meaning, the
tone, the structure and form, the key images used, etc…
Then I will explain the historical context in which the poem was written and the
place that this poem occupy in the overall work of Byron as well as the influence
of the poem nowadays.
ANALYSIS:
“Darkness” is a poem with different interpretations; it can be read as
a mixture of
an allegorical view of the end of times and a critic view about the degradation of
humankind.
The poem starts
as a picture of a dream, more like a nightmare, but with traces of
truth:
“I had a dream, which was not all a dream.”
Here, Byron is mixing reality with the unreal visions
of an illusion, like an
introduction of what we are going to read, a dream with a real meaning about the
corruption and degradation of humanity and its possible end.
The main ideas in this poem are the end of the world, the final destruction of
everything highlighting the disappearance of light as it is
said at the beginning of
the poem:
“The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,”
The idea of the men becoming beasts is thinly remarked by this idea of total
destruction, everything is fading and disappearing as
the humankind is being
degraded and corrupted until becoming irrational beasts.
As we can see, this is a poem with an ambiguous meaning, the so called literal
meaning – that about the overcoming of darkness and the end of times- and the
subjacent one – the meaning about the self-destruction and corruption of men:
“The crowd was famished by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies (…)
(…); then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shrieked, and died—“
Dealing with the tone I have to say that the poem if full of negative words, words
of dead, words of darkness giving to the poem a tone of depression and
desperation.
This depressing tone can be caused because of the depression that Byron was
suffering through that time, he was abandoned by his wife after giving birth to his
legitimate daughter Augusta Ada, he was also accused of incest with his
sister and
sodomy and the doubts about his sanity provoked him a big depression. Then
Byron abandoned England to never come back again.
At first the poem has a calmly tone, produced by iambic pentameters:
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