Thoughts on Poetry again

12/01/09

Again poetry facinated me. Perhaps 2009 would be year of poetry for me. I already included Shakespeare’s Romeo and Julieat in my reading plan. The poem that came to my attention is Darkness by Lord Byron.It’s an apocalptic poem written in the year1816.That year was known as year with out summer. A strange weather and in explicable darkness caused low tempertures across Europe. The reason for such dramatic change in weather was due to the eruption of Mountain Tambora in Indonesia which spewed enormous amount of volcanic ash in to the atmosphere. It was not known at the time. Inspired by such drastic scenery Lord Byron wrote the poem about impending doom.

The concluding part of the poem:

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 stirred within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped

They slept on the abyss without a surge -

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;

The winds were withered in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need

Of aid from them -She was the Universe!

How Lord Byron perceived the end of our universe. Read the full poem

http://www.online-literature.com/byron/685/