Byron's 1816 Dying Earth Poem Goes Dark - And it Has a Dog!

[00:00:00]Hello, fellow lovers of the liminal and the weird, and welcome to another video by Liminal Spaces.

[00:00:06]Today, I'm going to be doing a deep read of Lord Byron's poem Darkness, which was written in 1816, which of course is called the year without a summer because the eruption of a volcano put a large chunk of the earth into a volcanic winter. I've already talked about this on a video just before this one, but unfortunately, when I was editing, somehow I erased half of my reading of the poem. So, I'm going to read the poem all the way through because it is absolutely worth getting to the end.

[00:00:37]It's a dying earth story, and it tells little stories within it, and I have to believe that this inspired some writers, and we'll talk about that as we get further into the deep read. But for now, I'm going to read you the entire poem instead of just the first half. This is called Darkness by Lord Byron.

[00:00:57]I had a dream which was not all a dream.

[00:01:00]The bright sun was extinguished, 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 their desolation, and all hearts were chilled into a selfish prayer for light.

[00:01:26]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.

[00:01:37]Cities were consumed, and men were gathered round their blazing homes to look once more into each other's face.

[00:01:45]Happy were those who dwelt within the eye of the volcanoes, and their mountain torch a fearful hope was all the world contained. Forests were set on fire, but hour by hour they fell and faded, and the crackling trunks extinguished with a crash, and all was black.

[00:02:04]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 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 with curses cast them down upon the dust and gnashed their teeth and howled. The wild birds shrieked and terrified did flutter on the ground and flap their useless wings.

[00:02:42]The wildest brutes came tame and tremulous, and vipers crawled and twined themselves among the multitude, hissing but stingless.

[00:02:52]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 sat sullenly apart, gorging himself in gloom. No love was left. All earth was but one thought, and that was death immediate and inglorious.

[00:03:13]And the pang of famine fed upon all entrails. Men died, and their bones were tomb-less as their flesh. The meager by the meager were devoured. Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one, and he was faithful to a corpse and kept the birds and beasts and famished men at bay till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead lured their length jaws.

[00:03:37]Himself sought out no food, but with a piteous and perpetual moan and a quick desolate cry, licking the hand which answered not with the caress, he died.

[00:03:49]The crowd was famished by degrees, but two of an enormous city did survive, and they were enemies. They met beside the dying embers of an alter place, where had been heaped a mass of holy things for an unholy usage.

[00:04:04]They raked up 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 each other's aspects, saw and shrieked and died. Even of their mutual hideousness they died, unknowing who he was upon whose brow famine had written fiend.

[00:04:33]The world was void, the populace and the powerful was a lump, seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless, a lump of death, a chaos of hard clay.

[00:04:47]The rivers, lakes, and oceans all stood still, and nothing stirred within their silent depths. Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, and their masts fell down piecemeal. As they dropped, they slept on the abyss without a surge. The waves were dead, the tides were in their grave. The moon, their mistress, had expired before. The winds were withered in the stagnant air, and the clouds perished. Darkness had no need of aid from them. She was the universe.

[00:05:21]All right, this time I'll make sure that I don't lose half the poem in editing. I talked a lot last time about how the year without a summer probably inspired this poem, so I'm not going to talk about that a lot, but I am going to talk about a couple of aspects of the poem.

[00:05:40]And I'm going to start with the very beginning where it says the the earth is is roaming wanderlust, and and mourn comes and mourn leaves and mourn comes again and again, which really made me think of the house on the borderland with him speeding up in time and the sun going up and down and up and down in the sky as it slowly starts to burn out. I love this idea that at first darkness is the major issue that humanity has to deal with cuz the sun burns out and the earth is still existing, which I don't think it's scientifically possible, but whatever, maybe it is. So, they're burning all the past signs of successful civilizations become nothing but fuel so that man can sit and look at each other around fires again. And then the poem introduces the dog and I absolutely love this dog. It's so interesting because at this point the poem seemed to be omniscient looking down on the earth from afar and suddenly we zoom in not to a person, but to a dog and this is the last loyal dog on earth. All the other dogs had turned on their masters, but this one dog does not and it's beautifully described uh the final moments of this dog licking the hand of its master even though its master had already passed and could no longer pet him. Absolutely beautiful. I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff. Uh I like a hero dog. And again, it made me think of House on the Borderland with Pepper the dog uh who is also of I think a very important character in House on the Borderland. In some ways that entire uh William Hope Hodgson book House on the Borderland feels like uh a meditation on this poem, which is really interesting. I don't know if that's true, it just kind of feels like that to me. And then Byron takes it up another step and this time he has the last two people on earth and they are enemies and it doesn't say why um or which of them is bad and which of them is good but they both meet at this place where the last surviving things they can burn are this huge pile of holy relics which they're going to use for feeble light and they don't [clears throat] create much light but for just a moment the last two people see each other on earth in this faint flicker of flame and neither of them both of them are completely shocked with how the other looks and neither of them know who's the good guy or who's the bad guy and they both die and that is the end and in the end there's only darkness and she is the universe which is an incredible incredible end to a wild wild futuristic poem so there you go there's the whole poem there's some more thoughts on it I'm sorry about that other video I don't know what happened in the editing but I hope you come back and listen to the entire poem and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it in the comments all right thank you very much for watching and I'll see you on the next one