The sun shall be darkened’: eco-critical Byron and the feminine apocalyptic sublime in “Darkness” (1816)

Abstract

In terms of the representation of apocalyptic vision in modern English literature, there is a set of texts produced around 1816 by a group of Romantic authors that constitutes the most immediate response to climate change – a sense of the end of the world caused by untimely darkness and stormy weather. A brief three-year period of reduced sunlight in the northern hemisphere, caused by a major volcanic eruption, suggested to Byron a world in which human civilization, having lost every vestige of social contract, was finally extinguished in cannibalism. Though less famous than Mary Shelley’s novel, and its scenery of frozen Alpine wastes, Byron’s poem “Darkness” (1816) expresses in even more vivid imagery the sense of impending doom, the imminent collapse of social order, and the consequent threat to the human species that pervades Frankenstein (1818). The poem has been read both as a dream-vision with references to the Apocalypse and the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius and as a kind of figurative biography, an unfiltered response to the chaotic upheavals that rocked Byron’s personal life during the year of its composition. A more political dimension may also be derived from this text if we have in consideration its historical context of the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Indeed, within the artistic framework of the lyric in blank verse, Byron’s personal, political and ecological visions of the world are here jointly presented. In particular, the multiple levels of chaos that are implied grant particular significance to the ideas formulated in the poem’s final lines; ‘Darkness’ becomes a new and tangible entity, capable of shaping the universe in her own image. The possibility of a new universal order is represented by the dominion of a powerful universal femininity, whose disturbing sublimity is constructed upon the essentially masculine domain of the ‘old world’ that crumbles.