Subject: What is this poem about?
- Historical context: great famine, nightmare, post-apocalyptic – the world was literally dark, the sky was full of ash
- Begins as a dream – imagines the end of the world
- Men forgot their passions through anticipation of destruction
- Fear of the end of the world
- People burned the world for warmth and light
- Loss of hope
- Wild beasts were tame
- Snakes lost their venom
- People ate animals, and then each other
- Last two people were enemies – saw each other and screamed and died
- Darkness conquered the Universe
- Earth was a lump of death and chaos
- Rivers and lakes and oceans all stood still
- It’s about the end of the world and how people reacted
- Dark nature of humanity – killing to survive – when there’s no hope anyway
- We don’t see humanity banding together the way that they do in other post-apocalyptic visions – for example, War of the Worlds, The Walking Dead
- 28 Days Later – dark
- Mad Max – world runs out of water – fighting over water
- Is there a cause for the apocalypse in “Darkness”? Not explicitly – just a “dream” – only “cause” is Byron’s imagination
Form: What is the form of this poem? Consider meter, rhyme scheme, structure, and so on.
- No rhyme scheme
- Felt more like a speech than a poem – no real pausing point – first-person narration – not divided into stanzas, just one long block of text
- Iambic pentameter – lots of Shakespeare – Paradise Lost – could be writing into the epic tradition? Or into that elevated kind of heightened emotional register
- Could the rhythm be mimicking the way your heart beats faster in the dark?
- Unrhymed iambic pentameter = blank verse
- Lots of dashes – creates a pause – caesura (that’s a pause in the middle of a line) – processing time – dramatic effect – both reflection and anticipation – dark word generally comes right before or after – give something dark and then jump – how does the pause change the meaning of the phrase it interrupts?
- Almost feels stream-of-consciousness – lots of ands and very few periods – no real grammatical structures
- Like dreams – the connective tissue is grammatical rather than narrative
- Not enough time to take a breath – build anxiety, feel like you’re running for your life – reinforces the dreamer’s effort to hold onto the dream narrative? – when you don’t pause you don’t think – not necessarily rational – but would this undermine the warning – there’s no reason things will be like this? – but it’s a dream to him but it could also already happen – reflecting panic, or preventing us from seeing that panic isn’t necessary
- Where do the full stops fall – is there significance? – builds from nature to man to the universe
Word choice or diction: What is the tone? Is there any repetition? What imagery is used?
- Darkness is gendered female – why? Mother Nature – kills off everything, all human kind, all nature, rivers, lakes, chaos of hard clay? Mother Nature can be cruel?
- Hell on earth – hell has spread to earth
- -less words – negating everything – Mother Nature gives life and takes it away – emphasizes the void? – picture the whole world – mentions all the things that are around, and then takes it all away – connection to what it normally is, and then it isn’t
- Chaotic
- People who live near volcanoes are the exception – they’re the only people who don’t need to burn things for light
- Last line – even if we weren’t here, it would continue as it was – without wind and rain and clouds there’s no hope of anything growing back – clouds usually block sunlight, but in this context there’s nothing for the clouds to block – even nature is sort of lacking in purpose
- Why are some words capitalized?
Prompt: Use this brain storm to begin analyzing the poem. Explain the significance/meaning of one or more elements we observed in this poem.
14 replies on “3/8 notes and in-class writing”
Darkness is gendered because it refers to Mother Nature which has the power to kill everything. She can take away things or create. I think it is putting a negative light on women being evil and have the power of destruction. So it appears that women can be dominant.
There is also a ton of imagery in this poem. It really helped me picture what was going on in the story, so grotesque. The shrills of animals gave me chills. There was both auditory and visual imagery, although I wish they would talk about the scents.
“She was the Universe”, speaking of language,power and tone, the last sentence of the poem seems to portray or emphasize the total and utter power of destruction. So much so that even things that we thought of as trivial or take for granted like the clouds has been dominated.
“And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them.”
I am fascinated how Byron chose those three words to illustrate power.
The use of Imagery in Darkness by Lord Byron enhances the poem’s main theme of this chaotic world and the events that follow a volcanic eruption. Imagery is used very strongly throughout the poem to bring the reader into this world of darkness. One significant use of imagery is when Lord Byron discusses how people used volcanoes for a source of light, something that is so chaotic that people would risk their lives by being next to a volcano for the smallest bit of light. The actions of individuals burning entire forests and anything to create light also advocates, the darkness that existed as a result of this volcanic eruption and ash blocking any light from entering the Earth, Lord Byron refers to Earth earlier in the poem as “icy earth” which shows impact of this eruption and people’s desperate act of finding any source of light available.
We debated a lot on why there were so many dashes used in this poem. Do they create a pause? Or are they used to process time for dramatic effect? After going through the entire poem I feel that these dashes may have been used for a cause-then the effect. For instance;
“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”
Here it mentions forests being on fire, being a cause of what society had to do in order to see light and feel heat. Then there is a dash going into the effect on what these fires did to the trees mentioning that as time went on they fell and faded, and adding onto that effect there is another dash pushing the last effect of tress falling and faded into the cause for the next statement where the trunks of the trees were put out with a crash. The last dash here “and it was all black” is the effect of all these causes and effects leading to one major effect.
About the “Less” words. I took it to mean that because nature is a provider of life, food, shelter and the essentials for a growing population, that without nature and most importantly sunlight, trees, crops, and animals, that there would be no humans, and it would just be an empty dusty shell of a planet. You can’t survive without some form of nutrition and even humans need the sun to function at their most optimal levels.
The poem served to produce a level of panic in the reader successfully as well as retrospection for the nature of nature.
The poem “Darkness” represents a dangerous time on Earth. The poem gives a dark and gloomy visual of what the world looks like. There is a running theme that things that once had life were now lifeless. The things that did survive during this time were just has cruel as the earth they lived on. The in class brain storm gave me a better idea that Byron was possibly trying to make clear that Mother nature/planet earth did not need anything else to survive. That just as quickly as life is given on earth, Mother nature can take it away. By Byron not giving the actual cause for this “darkness” on earth, I think it proves that their may or may not have to be a cause for Mother Natures chaos because she is so powerful.
On the repetition of “less” throughout the poem, Byron shows how the world is degrading. When “less” is used as a suffix, it means “without” or an inability to perform. The world is without things like sunlight, the moon, seasons, and trees.
I also want to highlight the image of the world as a “lump.” Byron states that:
“The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.”
The world has turned into a lump of clay; there is nothing left except rock on earth. There are no sources of life and all that remains is this compact mass of clay.
One element that I believe this poem is based on is the “lack of something”. Byron is constantly saying what there is isn’t: “no love was left; Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea; And the clouds perish’d”. Byron helps paint the picture by showing us what is lost. I believe that element also exists in the grammar. There are not many periods, it just keeps going on. There are no stops or rests and it makes the whole poem feel like “the nightmare never ends”. There is also no rhyming, which I believe usually makes poetry sort of mentally satisfying, and Byron is not looking to satisfy the reader but on the contrary, tries to give him a sense of peril.
The author of the poem uses phrases like “A lump of death” and “Hissing, but stingless” in order to enhance the idea of the poem – the idea of darkness. The author uses the final line of the poem, “Of aid from them—She was the Universe,” to show that the world is dark and all hope is lost. It also shows that the darkness is in charge and the wold is the universe. This line also contributes to the overall depressing and gloomy feeling of the poem.
The way this poem begins was interesting because it mentions that Byron has a dream that “was not all a dream”. This makes the reader continue the poem with the thought that these experiences are all true. Death is emphasized a lot throughout this poem. The author shows a very pessimistic view of anything that contains light and life here. Especially in the last few lines, Byron portrays that he not only feels negatively towards anything in life, but the whole universe. I believe that he made darkness a “she” because he feels that mother nature betrayed us, and this experience throughout the poem is the opposite of mother nature.
I thought some of the dashes were there to give us a pause before delivering some bad news. In a few of them, there seemed to be something positive, lively or hopeful happening and then those hopes were gone. The story of the dog who was loyal to his dead owner seemed to give us a glimpse of hope and then that hope was quickly lost when it also died.
Byron uses a lot of dash in this poem. for example,”All earth was but one thought—and that was death Immediate and inglorious” for this line, I think he wants to make a pause and make more emphasis on the “death”. “Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black. ” for this particular line, he just adds more information. “Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless”—
A lump of death” all the words before dash are describing the death.
I think the use of dash in the poem “Darkness” by Lord Byron (George Gordon) is to emphasized the images and the importance of the things he saw in the reality, the disaster and the darkness, and to add more attention and power to the phrase after and before the dash. These dashes bring up people’s attenetion of the hopeless world he saw.
When considering “Darkness” by Lord Byron, the lack of grammatical structure seems to suggest a stream of consciousness through which Byron describes his dream. By excluding such structure to his poem, Byron accentuates a sense of panic without rational thought that seems to overarch the poem. Doing so in addition to incorporating “blank verse” Byron further underlines a sense of panic in how the pentameter may mimic a racing heartbeat while at the same time the lack of rhyme underlines the sense of urgency