Darkness

        Not a day exists when the world and all its’ people stood united; differences in culture, beliefs, and race set up tensions that prevails today.  Once the world comes to a halt, everyone unifies as disputes disintegrate in Lord Byron’s shot poem “Darkness”.  Byron envisions the world ending in his dream, yet he says, “…which was not all dream” (1); thus possibly implying a sight into the future.  Opening the poem, the sun’s fire, lava, heat, and energy suppresses until it finally reaches the point of nonexistence.  Without anything to orbit around, without the moon in sight, the world holds an imbalance.  Water and the ships that sail come to a standstill, food perishes without the nurturing sun, and creatures along with humans struggle to find food.  Everyone’s mind, power, and efforts shift into one sole purpose and focus; find food and produce light and heat. All the hard work, all the prized possessions, all the materialistic things, all burnt for survival.

            The “Darkness” sends a message to the culture and society the world currently lives in. The valuable character of an individual slowly breaks down as it molds into what others want to see, what society put out as the “norm”, and what everyone else follows.  To reach the norm people begin to act selfishly.  They focus on getting the new, the cool, and the high tech thing which in the end revolve around money and wealth.  These selfish needs play a factor in why people remain disunited.  With the things one has to fulfill their selfish needs, they forget to appreciate the basic essentials of life.  In the “Darkness” it describes how people are affected, once some of the essentials vanish, “The pall of a past world; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust, And gnashed their teeth and howled” (30-32)…  It also illustrates what happens to an individuals’ focus on the norm, “Morn came and went-and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread” (6-7). 

The “Darkness” sends a lesson to people; they need to depart from the influences of the society and resurrect their true selves.   To not remain yourself and to form into something else means to not present your uniqueness, your individuality.  Some people believe the journey someone goes through when following society helps them find their true self.  I insist it influences a person to live what they like to believe as their true self.  I think the destruction of the world acts as a metaphor to the destruction of individualism.  When everyone follows a society, everyone is the same; therefore Byron would say, “The world was void, The populous and the powerful was a lump” (69-70).  The world is useless, when the powerful or influential society has no backbone.  With all people acting alike it is just a lump without a shape of an individual.