[Given the Sun's reluctance to appear this year, I thought it was a good time to revive a piece I wrote for Birkbeck College's splendid Writer's Hub. This article first appeared there in June 2012.]
Among other things, I’m writing 121 poems about the Sun, and Byron’s pitch-black meditation feels like the reverse of my star-struck project. Or perhaps its inky lining. I‘ve struggled a little with Byron over the years but this poem, this dark matter, immediately gripped me.
It’s an epic disquisition upon sunless desolation. A long, elaborate accumulation of ‘less-ness’ dispatched in five long bravura sentences (six sentences in all when you count the short opening line: “I had a dream, which was not all a dream.”)
The matter of this half-dream is that “the bright sun was extinguish’d” and what follows is a tour de force of focused negativity and despairing detail. The withering suffix “—less” returns again and again to depopulate and pick clean the Universe, like a piranha: “Rayless”, “pathless”, “moonless”, “useless”, “stingless”, building towards the remorseless funeral cortege of trochaic falls:
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless —
By this late stage of the poem you have entered a world far more wretched than that glimpsed by Coleridge’s accursed mariner. Rather has this world enclosed you in suffocating gloom:
The world was void,
The populous and powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless —
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
Whatever else was going on in the life and mind of Byron, we know that 1816 was called ‘the year without a summer’ as temperatures and levels of sunlight plummeted across Europe and America. The culprit? Mount Tambora in the East Indies erupting and filling the atmosphere with volcanic ash. Much like the wonderfully named Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 (our recent ‘spring without air travel’).
So perhaps this is, among other things, a poem about globalisation: how an event in some distant place on the globe can affect everyone and everything. Around this time, interest in the fossil record and the emergence of palaeontology were further undermining theories of creation and our sense of species-security.
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 deprived of light, humankind has no nobility to fall back upon. Instead it falls into despair, paranoia, bloodlust and perhaps cannibalism: “The meagre by the meagre were devour’d”.
But this is just to hint at the narrative details of the poem; listen to its sounds instead:
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black.
The whole of nature is cowed and corrupted and all creatures (this is a great poem of levelling) are accursed and stripped of their former prowess:
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
And twin’d themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
I’ve no idea if Byron was familiar with Erasmus Darwin’s recently published Zoonomia but there’s something in the poem of Darwin’s theory of the three desires of every organism: “lust, hunger, and security”. There’s a base materialism in this poem and no religious redemption to be found. It recycles elements of The Book of Revelation but whereas that crazy book offers a ‘New Jerusalem’ and 1000 years of peace, this is what Byron offers:
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 with gloom; no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious;
In 1816, the Sun was little understood. We didn’t know how old it was or how it generated its phenomenal power or how long it would last. We now know it’s in fine middle age and has another 4.5 billion years or so of fuel left. Surely not knowing these things about the Sun made its existence more precarious. Although it still will not avoid a portion of the terrible fate that Byron dwells upon.
While it teeters on the brink of near-comical hyperbole, this poem sends my thoughts in two opposite temporal directions. Back to Milton’s overwhelming, distraught passages on blindness in ‘Samson Agonistes’ and forwards to the purported ‘heat death of the Universe’, when all thermodynamic energy will be depleted and Byron’s darkness will descend:
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
Ultimately, for me the poem conjures up not despair but delight and enormous relief that another day has dawned and that we’re living in the creative prime of the Universe, for now.
Darkness
by Lord Byron (George Gordon)
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;
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,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,
And men were gather'd round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
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
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
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
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
And twin'd 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;
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 devour'd,
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
Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
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 rak'd up,
And shivering scrap'd 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
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,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
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 wither'd in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.