After today’s discussion about ‘The Year Without a Summer’ — the period of darkness and cold in 1816, caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in modern-day Indonesia the year prior — I was naturally curious about the connections between this disaster and Byron’s poem “Darkness.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that the poem was published in 1816 and describes crop failure and perpetual gloom, it is actually mentioned by name on the Wikipedia page for ‘The Year Without a Summer:’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer . Such a context gives the first line, which I initially considered to be a bit silly, some needed force: “I had a dream, which was not all a dream.” Byron was living through conditions vaguely reminiscent of those he describes, and these conditions would have been at peak strangeness in July when he penned the poem. It was interesting to me that the Norton did not mention this context, opting instead to note contemporary developments in geology that would have shone new light on the nature of extinction (and, by extension, humankind’s own potential for it).
I am interested by Byron’s simultaneous avoidance of discussing what was actually occurring at the time and his extrapolation of the events to a cosmic scale. How seriously did people interpret these changes? Were they grounds for a loss of faith in religion, as could be alluded to with the burning of “holy things / for an unholy usage” atop an altar as well as the other religious references in the poem? Or simply material for poetry and speculation on mankind’s future? Please reply if you guys have any thoughts or have found any related information.
