Metaphor and the Unprecedented: Byron’s ‘Darkness’ and Responding to Ecological Disaster

Abstract

Byron’s ‘Darkness’ (1816) is less a description of the ‘Year Without a Summer’ than an exposition of the conditions of possibility as well as the costs of a metaphorical treatment of a darkening of the world. At liberty to relate a catastrophe that far outstrips the disastrous aftermath of the eruption of Mount Tambora, the narrator is also incapable of action: the poem’s opening line—‘I had a dream, which was not all a dream’—and its use of the past tense confirm the distance at which ecological devastation can become the material of metaphor. Early readings of the poem (such as Walter Scott’s) that took it merely for an expression of the poet’s morbid sensibility are as one-sided as recent readings (such as Jonathan Bate’s) that stress the work’s environmentalist sympathies: the melancholia of the poem is tied up with the melancholia of the independence of the poetic subject in relation to nature.