Darkness
by George Gordon, Lord Byron 
   
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; 5
Morn came and went — and came, and brought no day,  
And men forgot their passions in the dread  
Of this their desolation; and all hearts  
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:  
And they did live by watchfires — and the thrones, 10
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; 15
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye  
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:  
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;  
Forests were set on fire — but hour by hour  
They fell and faded — and the crackling trunks 20
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 25
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 30
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 tremulous; and vipers crawl’d 35
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; 40
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, 45
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,  
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept  
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,  
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead 50
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 55
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, 60
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands  
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath  
Blew for a little life, and made a flame  
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up  
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld 65
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, 70
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless —  
A lump of death — a chaos of hard clay.  
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,  
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;  
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, 75
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 expir’d before;  
The winds were withered in the stagnant air, 80
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need  
Of aid from them — She was the Universe.
  
 
 

Darkness — Byron wrote this poem in July, 1816. People commonly called that year the year without a summer because a series of volcanic eruptions over the previous several years, culminating in a catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora — a volcano in what is now Indonesia — in April 1815, altered weather across Europe, North America, and Asia. The Mount Tambora eruption was the most powerful in the world since the year 180 A.D.

In 1816, people reported a dry fog that dimmed the apparent light of the sun so much that you could see sunspots on the sun’s surface with the naked eye; it was really ash. The result was cooler, rainier weather. Frosts and snow — sometimes colored by the volcanic ash — occurred during the summer months in many places that should have been warm. The result of all of these weather disruptions was agricultural crises across Europe. Crops would not grow properly, which brought on famines that led to mass starvations. Exact figures are hard to ascertain, but worldwide certainly hundreds of thousands of people died, and that may be a low estimate.
 
darkling — dimming
 
sate — sat
 
corse — corpse
 
clung — starved, emaciated (perhaps derived from the way the skin of a starving person clings to their ribs)
 
ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea — compare to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”