By Lord Byron (1816)
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…
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…
Originally published in Poems (1816) by Lord Byron. Public domain.
Analysis
Written in the “year without a summer,” Byron’s vision of global night is both nightmare and experiment. The blank-verse cadence is prophetically calm, describing panicked humanity with scientific chill. As nature’s lights go out, so do social bonds; prayer becomes instinct, not devotion. The poem refuses consolation, ending not with judgment but with entropy.
Its modernity lies in the voice — solitary, observational, unseduced by myth. Byron imagines apocalypse as a slow physics rather than an angry providence, and the effect is more terrible for the lack of a moral exit. The universe is not against us so much as indifferent. “Darkness” is Romanticism stripped to bone — grandeur without comfort.