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Lord Byron's 'Darkness': A Post-Apocalyptic Tale of Climate Change

The Byronic post-apocalyptic Earth is extreme, but so is the way we interact with the planet.
Lord Byron portrait by Thomas Phillips

In 1815, Indonesia's Mount Tambora experienced a super-eruption, triggering global climate shifts that produced famine, riots, disease outbreak, and mass death.

The great Romantic poet Lord Byron, holed up in Geneva at the time, responded with a post-apocalyptic poem called "Darkness," which portrayed a vision of an "icy Earth" full of desolation, burning cities, and global warfare. Nearly two centuries on, it remains a poignant portrait of a future marred by climate disaster.

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Mount Tambora's volcanic ash, ejected into the upper atmosphere, eventually fell back to Earth, bringing stasis once again to the planet. But in Byron's post-apocalyptic landscape, climate change and its effects are permanent. It's a bleak, bleak world; a Romantic-era precursor to the monochromatic desolation of Cormac McCarthy'sThe Road.

Mount Tambora. Image: Wikimedia Commons/ Jialiang Gao

Byron's post-apocalypse also calls to mind Bong Joon-Ho's Snowpiercer, an imaginative vision of a world thrust into a new ice age after global warming remediation goes awry, killing all life across the world. The survivors of the planetary catastrophe find themselves, as in "Darkness," at odds with one another aboard a perpetual motion machine-powered train that circles the new icy Earth. While the humans in "Darkness" dwindle to extinction, the survivors of Snowpiercer endure an enclosed, classist dystopia from which there is no escape.

Byron, who defended Luddites in a famous House of Lords speech in which he criticized technology and the Industrial Revolution, didn't write "Darkness" as an indictment of humanity's rising ecological abuse. The trigger is purely solar.

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…

Perhaps Byron might have privately felt that technological advancement and byproducts of manufacture and consumption could create unintended ecological effects, though the modern concept of ecology itself was still being refined. Nothing we have in existing letters or anecdotes suggests he commented on it. Regardless, "Darkness" exists as a future vision of how humanity might devolve in the face of climate change.

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In the poem, Byron doesn't say how many degrees global temperature dropped. What we know is that temperatures actually dropped enough for 1816 to be referred to as the "Year Without a Summer," with some locales recording temperature drops of 3-5 degrees Fahrenheit on average, as was the case in New England. Byron, imagining this as humanity's new reality, envisions human civilization coming absolutely undone as a result.

After the fairly cosmic first five lines, Byron brings events down to Earth. How would humankind respond to such an altered Earth? After the Sun dims, morning comes and goes, bringing no day with it. As Byron writes, "men forgot their passions in the dread" of "their desolation," while hearts are chilled into a "selfish prayer for light."

Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. Image: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

Byron then writes of cities and homes burnt as beacons and sources of illumination in the global darkness. He also dreams of humans setting forests on fire for light and warmth. While that specifically is an unlikely scenario in our future, we already know that wildfires are becoming bigger and more destructive, and without the help of human torches.

This ecological destruction visits biblical, Book of Revelation-style hell on Earth. Some people are reduced to an almost happy delirium, while others run amok. It's at this point that the poem also veers toward the the surreal darkness of the third panel in Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, which depicts civilization's total collapse.

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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.

After a time of peace, war comes fast and swift. All love is vanished. It's eat or be eaten in Byron's "Darkness." Kill or be killed. Famine then takes hold, but "two of an enormous city did survive." The two are enemies upon whose brows "famine had written Fiend." They work to build a fire, and when they see the horror written upon each other's faces, they shriek and die.

Could climate change apocalypse reduce food and resources to such a point that war and murder would become inevitable? Not necessarily, but it's already been shown that climate change has fuelled unrest around the world.

Byron probably over-calculated in what extreme climate change might do to the Earth and humanity. But we should forgive him this little bit of artistic license, for he gave us a really excellent science-fiction vision in the form of a darkly gorgeous prose poem.

And what did Byron see after all humans and other creatures vanish from the Earth?

…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.

Now that is darkness. Think upon it the next time you read about fluctuations in global climate. The Byronic post-apocalyptic Earth is extreme, but so are we as a species, and in the way we interact with the planet. In "Darkness," Byron just held up the mirror.