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.
