• Français
• English

‘She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes….’

The singer clasped her hands to her mouth. She stood, bewildered.
‘What words are those?’ asked the musicians.
‘What song is that?’
‘What language is that!’1

1Ray Bradbury’s Martians are warned of the arrival of Earthlings thanks to their telepathic ability; and Byron’s words flow out from the mouth of an uncomprehending singer on stage. One is rarely tempted to see the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a science-fictional prophet. And yet. In Cain, a Mystery (1822), the eponymous hero is brought to outer space by Lucifer, who shows him the many intelligent species that lived and died before him, and in “Darkness” (1816), Byron imagines the social impact of apocalypse. There is an anticipational vein to the poetry of the author of Don Juan, just as much as there is a prophetic dimension to it. Indeed, in his famous 1996 article, “Living with the Weather,” Jonathan Bate goes as far as dubbing Byron “a prophet of ecocide.”2

2The present article means to explore how these two works, “Darkness” and Cain, A Mystery,3 put together, set up the bases of very strong trends of science-fictional literature: post-apocalyptic fiction and climate fiction. We shall first direct our attention to what these two works reveal about Byron’s vision of apocalypse, as well as his uncannily precocious intuition of humankind’s transience on this planet. Having established how these works plant the seeds of end-of-days and climate fiction, this article offers to look at one particular fruit on the Byronian tree of apocalypse: Dan Fogelman’s television series Paradise (2025).4 Eventually, I will discuss what this anticipational reading, within the sphere of literary history, does to the original works – how it has become impossible, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, not to read them as pre-post-apocalyptic literature.

3Specialists agree on the general context of the composition of Byron’s “Darkness.” The appalling weather of 1816, the year without a summer, is the first element that comes to mind when reading its first lines.

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;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black. (ll. 1-21)

4Describing the anguish of a world deprived of light, Byron’s “Darkness” is “not all a dream,” as it merely depicts a darker version of what the villa Diodati guests, like anyone in Europe at the time, would have been experiencing. Jonathan Bate gives a thorough description of this exceptional weather context:

Might the origin of the poem not be the absence of sunshine in June, July and August 1816? It rained in Switzerland on 130 out of the 183 days from April to September 1816. The average temperature that July was an astonishing 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit below the mean for that month in the years 1807-1824. As Byron shivered in Geneva, so did his readers back home. In London it rained on eighteen days in July 1816 and on only one day did the temperature reach 70 degrees; during the same month the previous year, the temperature was over 70 degrees on nineteen days and it only rained three times. 70 degrees was recorded on only two days in August, whereas the figure for the previous year was thirteen. At noon on 1 September 1816, the temperature in London was 47 degrees; the average noon temperature in the first half of the previous September had been 63 degrees.5

5We now know what Byron and his contemporaries did not: that the cause of this irregular weather was the eruption, in 1815, of Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, that obscured the planet’s sky for several months, causing terrible weather and harvests all around, on top of the direct death of an estimated 80,000 people on the islands of Sumbawa and Lombok. Bate and others comment on the unintentional irony of Byron suggesting the “happiness” of those living near volcanoes when light and warmth are gone.

6The poem, however, turns gloomy weather into apocalyptic vision. These were indeed apocalyptic times, times when worlds literally ended. The first generation of Romantics had seen the French monarchy, of absolute divine right, be felled, and heads roll. In fact, this fantasy of a sun that will rise nevermore echoes lines from Macbeth, when darkness has invaded the world following what is also, coincidentally, a regicide:

[…] the heavens, as troubled with man’s act,
Threaten his bloody stage. By the clock ‘tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp.
Is’t night's predominance, or the day’s shame,
That darkness does the face of earth entomb,
When living light should kiss it?6

7The second generation of Romantic writers died too young to go through the conservative turn that swallowed eminent members of the first. Yet it does not seem far-fetched to consider they inherited the trauma of the recent historical cataclysm, and the end of the Bourbons’ reign in France was not the only one. The fall Byron, Shelley and their contemporaries were the spectators of, was the shooting-star trajectory of Bonaparte – “the sun of Austerlitz.” Fascinated by the figure of Napoleon, who rose from nothing and conquered half of Europe, the second generation saw an Empire be born and turn to dust. They witnessed the transience of human glory, and poems like Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” for all their triumphant irony vis-à-vis tyrants, convey some disquietude over the realization that time, not art, is the ultimate victor.

8Byron’s “Darkness,” however, stages an inverted chronology of events: it is not the social unrest that leads to murder and murder that leads to darkness – a classic theological vision of apocalypse as a form of punishment; it is the darkness that uproots humanity’s moral sense. Deprived of light, humanity becomes a fierce agent of destruction: people burn all they can for warmth and light, and famine leads them to eat each other (like Duncan’s horses in the same scene of Macbeth, incidentally):

And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour’d… (ll. 38-46)

9Alexander Regier convincingly details the subtle workings of the poem, using a wheel metaphor quite familiar to Elizabethan tragedies:

Once the wheels of destruction are turning, we are taken in by the imagination until we hit probably the most memorable line of the poem, the one that survives longest with us (at least with me), which is also the description of ultimate excess: ‘The meagre by the meagre were devoured’ (46). Again, we are faced with the human catastrophe of cannibalism. However, in this case there is no social construction through which we can make light of the ideological fault. Similarly, the cannibalism here is relentless and pitiless, with no frame or rhetorical move that would allow us to distance ourselves. We ourselves would be one of the ‘meagre,’ ready to devour our fellow-reader.7

10What is so striking about the poem’s apocalyptic vision is its finality. Everything dies, not just humankind and animals, but the waves, the tides, the moon, the clouds. All have become superfluous. What the poem stages is the rise of one single absolute power: Darkness.

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. (ll. 73-82)

11The final verse somehow enacts this finality. As Regier cleverly points out: “At this point ‘Darkness’ is the only poetic form (uni-verse) that is left; utter stasis and catastrophe reign, death and negation are complete.”8 Moreover, the stress pattern emphasizes the final melting of the world – the universe is a dactyl (or rather, its ending, a pyrrhic), and its last two syllables, unstressed, fade into silence, so that the poem enacts the very spreading of nothingness it describes: “One of the most powerful aspects of the poem is that it urges us to conceive of the possibility of total annihilation, a scenario that goes beyond the apocalyptic since there is no saving force.”9

12“Darkness” is more spectacularly and efficiently apocalyptic than Cain, yet the lyrical drama does also convey worries of an apocalyptic, or at least, cataclysmic nature. In Act II, which takes place in “The Abyss of Space,” Lucifer declares to Cain:

…but fly with me o'er the gulf
Of space an equal flight, and I will show
What thou dar’st not deny,—the history
Of past—and present, and of future worlds. (ll. 22-25)

13He shows Cain the phantoms of the creatures that peopled the earth before humankind was created:

Cain: But what were they?
Lucifer: Living, high,
Intelligent, good, great, and glorious things,
As much superior unto all thy sire
Adam could e’er have been in Eden, as
The sixty-thousandth generation shall be,
In its dull damp degeneracy, to
Thee and thy son; —and how weak they are, judge
By thy own flesh.
Cain: Ah me! and did they perish?
Lucifer: Yes, from their earth, as thou wilt fade from thine. (ll. 67-75)
[…]
Cain: But how?
Lucifer: By a most crushing and inexorable
Destruction and disorder of the elements,
Which struck a world to chaos, as a chaos
Subsiding has struck out a world: such things,
Though rare in time, are frequent in eternity.—
Pass on, and gaze upon the past.
Cain: ‘Tis awful!
Lucifer: And true. Behold these phantoms! they were once
Material as thou art. (ll. 79-87)
[…]
Cain: Thou hast shown me wonders: thou hast shown me those
Mighty Pre-Adamites who walked the earth
Of which ours is the wreck: thou hast pointed out
Myriads of starry worlds, of which our own
Is the dim and remote companion, in
Infinity of life: thou hast shown me shadows
Of that existence with the dreaded name
Which my sire brought us—Death; thou hast shown me much. (ll. 358-365)

14Cain accomplishes some strange syncretism. On the one hand, this lyrical drama is abstract and theological; on the other hand, it is based on the most recent works of geology and paleontology. Byron, in a note to his preface, sees no paradox in bringing the two together:

Note —The reader will perceive that the author has partly adopted in this poem the notion of Cuvier, that the world had been destroyed several times before the creation of man. This speculation, derived from the different strata and the bones of enormous and unknown animals found in them, is not contrary to the Mosaic account, but rather confirms it; as no human bones have yet been discovered in those strata, although those of many known animals are found near the remains of the unknown.10

15This should be enough to make Byron a prophet of science-based apocalypse. Chris Washington reads in Cain Byron’s indictment of a carnivorous humanity, enacting its own destruction through the massacre of innocent animals.11 Pointing out the Regency as a coincidence of “the genesis of the Anthropocene era, the time of human-made climate-change, and the beginning of the slaughter of animals for food on a massive, mechanized scale,” Washington insists on “the play’s final, ironic judgment on the silence of the lambs, and the silence of Abel, [which] appears to be that humans are the problem and the solution, as they will eventually wipe themselves out, as Cain does to Abel and as humans will continue to do to animals.”12 Washington even makes a case for the Romantics as inventors of the post-human: “Romantic writers invent the post-apocalyptic genre not to advocate extinction and exclusion – of the creature, of humans – but rather to design an ontologically radical social contract that includes both the human and the nonhuman, bringing all creatures in from the cold”.13

16Byron does not, indeed, “advocate extinction and exclusion,” but he is certainly one of the very first to illustrate human extinction in a work not only based on imagination but on the most recent scientific theories. If religious works have always been fascinated with the concept of the end of time, eighteenth-century literature played a fair part in this reflection.14 But the radical novelty of Byron’s work is that it imagines not the end of our way of living (which the Christian apocalypse does) but the eradication of the human race. This is what Benjamin Morgan, relocating Byron’s “Darkness” within literary history, calls the “last man trope.”

Although the decadents were not the first to contemplate a dying Earth, their adaptation of this trope distinctively treated apocalypse not as an event visited from without—as it often was for the Romantics—but as an incipient possibility of natural and political systems. The idea of an exhausted planet can be traced to Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le dernier homme (1805, translated as The Last Man, or Omegarus and Syderia in 1806), which envisions Adam returning to the Earth at the end of time when the sun’s “fire was grown dim” and “the earth had undergone the common destiny. After having for ages struggled against the efforts of time and men, who had exhausted it, she bore the melancholy features of decay” (23). Cousin de Grainville’s volume, along with the climatic effects of the eruption of Mount Tambora, inspired the canonical expressions of Romantic millenarianism: George Gordon Byron’s “Darkness” (1816), in which “the bright sun was extinguished” and the “icy Earth / Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air” (lines 4-5); Thomas Campbell’s “The Last Man” (1823) in which “The Sun’s eye had a sickly glare, / The earth with age was wan” (lines 11-12); and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), in which humanity is decimated by plague. In 1825, one reviewer described Cousin de Grainville’s volume as “having gone the rounds of all circulating libraries for years past” (“Mr. Campbell’s Last Man” 589), and by 1826, when Shelley’s novel was published, Thomas Hood and others were parodying the last man trope.15

17Although one might disagree with Morgan’s first affirmation (that Romantic apocalypse is brought over from without; Washington argues the opposite), this impressive list shows the end of humanity to be a rather well-spread preoccupation in the days of the Regency. Yet, in Cain, Byron fuses biblical revelation with scientific truth, and, as in “Darkness,” leaves no outside space. The faithful and the rational should all come to terms with what the lyrical drama presents as evidence (in both meanings of that word): humankind will come to an end. Regier insists that the powerfulness of the poem “Darkness” is precisely that it leaves no way out:

[…] this poem does not allow us to step back, survey, and consider its apocalyptic vision in the way that almost all of the rest of Byron’s corpus does and encourages. Even though it is not surprising, it is also significant that Byron’s reflection upon, and figuration of, the excessive occurs under the sign of catastrophe [.…] In ‘Darkness’, Byron takes the risk that this distance is not available.16

18These two works mark Byron as the author of texts that not only consider the end of humankind but that do so in a way that makes the readers feel they are part of this story: Cain, because the scientific evidence of the disappearance of entire worlds before us makes deniability impossible, and “Darkness” because its poetic form leaves no way out. Byron opens up a space yet unknown, the thought experiment of a world without humans to live in and reflect upon. This anguish echoes Shelley’s in the last lines of “Mont Blanc”:

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind’s imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?17

19What would the world look like – what will the world look like – when silence and solitude are vacancy? Byron tears open the veil of the unthinkable – an end to the reign of humankind on earth that has nothing to do with divine law or judgement. That is not punishment, but fact. Byron’s “Darkness”, especially read along with Cain, is certainly part of the “last man” trope, but takes it further. It is not just fiction that gives you the shivers, it is prophetic. And it foretells not just the end of the world, but also a whole new literary trend: the post-apocalyptic, the genre that deals with what happens to the inhabitants of a planet when the end is upon them.

20The post-apocalyptic genre, in novels, movies and TV series, has been flooding the world of artistic creation over the last few decades. It is often of a dystopian vein. Indeed, Frederic Jameson, one of the great theoreticians of science-fiction, does not really acknowledge it as a genre, considering it part of the dystopian genre.18 If we take that label to mean any work that deals with the end of humanity, or its difficult survival after a major cataclysmic event, several famous novels come to mind – those of H.G. Wells, J. G. Ballard or John Wyndham, for instance, though not all of these novels are science-fictional. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), for instance, describes a dark and ultra-violent world in which a father and his son try to survive. Most media have seen an exponential growth in the number of works created dealing with such topics, from Hollywood’s disaster movies to graphic novels, like Jacques Lob’s and Jean-Marc Rochette’s Snowpiercer (1984). The genre comprehends various subgenres, and the works “that employ the specific scientific paradigm of anthropogenic climate change in their plot” are considered as climate fiction, or cli-fi, for the fans.19 Some of them are major works of art, which sometimes leads one to forget their post-apocalyptic dimension. Such is the case of Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play Endgame, for instance. The space of the present article is not enough to account for Byron’s wide-ranging influence on that genre, besides the fact that the “last man” trope he contributed to has opened up this new alley in literature and other arts (not just narrative ones). Instead, I propose to look at one (post-)apocalyptic work that openly claims its debt to Byron: the recent TV series, Paradise.

21The 2025 television series, Paradise, is part of what specialists refer to as apocalyptic fiction, a genre that flourished in the late twentieth century, with blockbuster movies like Independence Day (1996), Armageddon (1998), and Deep Impact (1998), to name but a few. To name, actually, those staging an outside catastrophe as the cause of humanity’s imminent destruction, as well as superproductions in which human courage and resourcefulness save the day. Yet, as the general public’s awareness of the dangers of climate change kept growing, one trend of post-apocalyptic fiction has begun to soar: climate fiction. Paradise chooses not to choose between natural and human-made catastrophe. “We are preparing for a massive catastrophe that could cause an extinction-level event for humanity in the very near, very real future,” announces a five-star general in episode 1 (45’27). Paradise does discard viruses and aliens as agents of doom, but the end of humanity it stages is due to various causes. It starts with a cataclysm of natural origin yet partially provoked by climate change, and the geopolitical chaos that results brings about a nuclear winter. In a possible echo of the context of the composition of Byron’s poem “Darkness,” the nature of the cataclysm that triggers apocalypse is a volcanic eruption. In the second episode, the future US president and a billionaire who will build the Colorado underground compound that gives its name to the series, meet at a sparsely attended conference by a scientist no one listens to, one Dr Louge. The episodes are built on a series of flashbacks, and it is only in episode 7 (the penultimate of the season) that we learn the cause of the cataclysm, as the characters watch a news broadcast:

Just over three hours ago, what scientists are calling a massive mega-caldera, or super-volcano, erupted under the Antarctic ice sheet, expelling millions of tons of ash into the atmosphere. The force of the explosion shattered large portions of the ice shelf, instantly melting trillions of gallons of water and triggering a tsunami that is hurtling northward at nearly 600 miles an hour. Most disturbingly, some reports indicate the wave may be as high as 300 feet.20

22A few moments later, Dr Louge, the scientist from episode two, is being interviewed by the anchor, who wants to know when the wave will stop. The modern-day bearded and bespectacled Cassandra answers: “when it is done. After rolling up to the North Pole and echoing back down to Antarctica, maybe a dozen more times. Anything under 300 feet above sea-level will be inundated.”21

23Some of the rich and powerful of the world knew what was coming, and their reaction was to build an underground city for themselves. The codename of the evacuation procedure is, tellingly, Versailles. Yet it is not only human negligence and selfishness the series means to denounce – as it suggests, the final catastrophe is in fact man-made. Upstream, it is man-made climate change that “allowed the cork to pop”22; downstream, the reaction of many countries to the event is the massing of troops on boarders, land grabs, and the launching of nuclear weapons, all of which had been predicted by the villainess’s scientific models – “that the eruption of the Antarctic super volcano would lead to nuclear war.”23

24A volcanic eruption and the ensuing self-destruction of humanity would probably not be enough to signal Paradise as heir to Byron’s apocalyptic writings, if episode 5 did not choose to make that parentage obvious. First, through its title, “In the Palaces of Crowned Kings,” which is a direct quote from “Darkness,” but also, more unusual for popular entertainment, the episode contains a reading of an abridged version (in two parts) of the poem. It opens with a reading of the first nine lines of “Darkness,” as the picture shows the top of what looks like a modern-day stone pyramid emerging from the ocean.24 As the voice-over continues to read, a new shot shows Washington DC today, and the viewers understand that what they saw in the first shot was in fact the tip of the obelisk, making the “DC today” shot a pre-apocalyptic flashback. Later in the episode, the senile father of the US president, in the beautiful house of the Colorado underground compound where they have taken shelter, insists on getting one of his books from the library: the old brown leather-bound volume reads “Byron” in graceful golden calligraphy. In yet another scene (35’35), the president’s father reads out loud. “[C]ities were consumed… once more into each other’s face,” he chuckles, closes the book and declares:

I averaged two books a week for my entire life and now all I can read is poetry. It’s the only thing that will stay in my brain from start to finish. My wife, she was an English teacher. High school. And she loved teaching this poem. “Darkness”. Lord Byron. My wife said it was one of the few poems that actually got her kids to sit up in their seats.25

25The episode closes on the opening sight – the tip of the DC obelisk sticking out from a dark ocean – and the voice-over reads “The world was void…” to the end of the poem. As we hear Byron’s words, we see characters trying to rebel against the evil billionaires who built the underground compound; and in the very end we realize it was the president’s father reading the poem all along.

26As a small echo of Cain, Dr Louge, in episode 7, loses his nerve when interrogated about humanity’s chances of survival. At the White House, the president’s secretary, who has understood she is not to be evacuated in the Versailles plan, is asking the main character – Xavier Collins, the head of the president’s security detail – to save her sick baby; in the background the voice of the scientist is heard:

[Dr. Louge]: … no crops, no food, never-ending winter.
[Anchor]: What happens then?
[Dr. Louge]: I don’t know. Why don’t you ask a fucking dinosaur?26

27A rhetorical question through which Louge suggests humans are just about to become part of those species that have been wiped out in the history of our planet. The TV show contrasts the immediate awareness of impending doom, the soul-searing realization that our species is about to become what those creatures are now, extinct, with the foreknowledge the “zillionaires” had of it, and in prevision for which they have dug a hole in the Colorado mountains large enough to shelter a city of 25,000 with twenty-first century US standards of comfort – what President Bradford, in a former episode, refers to as “Xanadu.” This is, of course, yet another Romantic reference – in this case, to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” But more than that, it is a revelation: the title of the series is borrowed from the poem’s last word: Paradise. Another dactyl, paradise, concentrates, in a microcosm, the inverted image of the universe, now a dark and hostile macrocosm. One is struck by the many references to caves and caverns in Coleridge’s lines. Besides, the Khan has built “a miracle of rare device,” and in his domain, “twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls and towers were girdled round”, yet the sacred river Alph flows “down to a sunless sea.” Quite an interesting experiment: rereading “Kubla Khan” after seeing Paradise. One finds allusions everywhere. One knows this is ridiculous, but there is nothing to it.

28That is why it seems imperative to end this reflection on Byron’s post-apocalyptic progeny – a word used by Mary Shelley in her introduction to the 1831 edition to refer to Frankenstein, her “hideous progeny” – with a reflection on the notion of influence itself. Bringing Harold Bloom into the discussion is most appropriate here. First, because he was the unrivalled master of influence. But also because the post-apocalyptic genre, particularly in its cli-fi vein, borrows as much from psychoanalysis as Bloom’s theory of influence did.27 Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence28 is a psychoanalytical reading of poetic history as a gigantic Oedipus complex – strong poets needing to symbolically kill their strong predecessors so as not to be stifled by their influence.29 It has been copiously mocked for its inexcusable gender bias, not to say machismo, but also for the candor his theory somehow displays – reproaches never more clearly and wittily formulated than under the pen of famous SFF writer Ursula K. Le Guin:

Then there was this book, The Anxiety of Influence […] I’m faintly incredulous when I hear that phrase used seriously. The book came out at the same time that a lot of us were energetically rejoicing in the rediscovery and reprinting of earlier woman writers, the rich inheritance that had been withheld from all writers by the macho literary canon. While these guys were over there being paranoid about influence, we were over here celebrating it.

[…] That the accepted notion of literary influence is appallingly simplistic is shown, I think, by the fact that it overlooks, ignores, disdains the effect of “pre-literature” – oral stories, folk tales, picture books – on the tender mind of the pre-writer.30

29Bloom’s theory is certainly simplistic and problematic in many ways. Yet, at the end of his essay, he puts forward a revolutionary reader-based theory: that of a reverse influence. Bloom comes up with exuberant Greek names to refer to the various denial devices strong poets resort to in order to survive, i.e., develop a work of their own, keep up the show of “priority,” to avoid being stifled by the greatness of their predecessors’ works. The most unsettling of all the concepts he makes up is the last one: “apophrades, or, the return of the dead” – that is, when strong poets “achieve a style that captures and oddly retains priority over their precursors, so that the tyranny of time almost is overturned, and one can believe, for startled moments, that they are being imitated by their ancestors.”31

When I read Le Monocle de mon oncle now, in isolation from other poems by Stevens, I am compelled to hear Ashbery’s voice, for his mode has been captured by him, inescapably, and perhaps forever.32

We feel, in reading The Witch of Atlas, that Shelley has read too deeply in Yeats, and is doomed never to get the tonal complexities of the Byzantium poems out of his mind.33

30Of course, this is tongue-in-cheek. But not only. If one is willing to follow the master and do the reading, one is indeed unsettled. My surmise is that what Bloom identifies, this reverse influence in the field of poetic creation, also carries some weight as far as the post-apocalyptic genre goes, particularly when a topic appears so late in literary history as that of climate apocalypse. My contention is that because Byron has torn the veil of the unthinkable, opened up a way for the imagination to go where angels fear to tread, it has now become impossible to read Byron’s “Darkness” as anything else than a warning about our pre-apocalyptic predicament.

31Jonathan Bate opens his article “Living with the Weather” with an anecdote: he recalls his mixed feelings (romantically enthusiastic and politically disturbed) at the extensive quotes from “Darkness” in a speech by Labour Leader Michael Foot on the necessity of nuclear disarmament. Foot used Byron’s lines to describe what Byron could not have imagined but does indeed describe: nuclear winter – nuclear powers destroying humanity’s habitat by detonating weapons of mass-destruction against each other. Yet when Bate dubs Byron “a prophet of ecocide,” is he not also reading into the poem what could not really have been there? Could Lord Byron have had a vision of what the majority of humankind still has trouble coming to terms with, i.e., that our species has destroyed its habitat and probably fatally endangered itself? Byron’s works are post-apocalyptic in their genre but pre-apocalyptic in their awareness of doom.

32Yet, this leaves us with one question: why do we feel Byron is telling us about our own world-ending when he could not have been? I believe the answer lies in Regier’s very appropriate identification of “Darkness” as an elegy:

‘Darkness’ is an elegy that does not allow for a distancing or sublime view, and thus the relentless piling of negatives suggests more than a catastrophe: ‘The world was void […] Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless’ (69-71). The repetition here kills difference, brutally making sure nothing is left: everything is ‘less’ in the end. The piece envelops the reader in atrophy that is a mourning that never comes since there will be nobody left to do the work of mourning.34

33“Darkness” is an elegy, and like all elegies, its point is – paradoxically, considering the horrors it depicts – solace, comfort. Byron is probably not the “prophet of ecocide”, but his poem is most certainly what Sarah Montin identifies as a “proleptic elegy.” Drawing on the work of Bonnie Costello, she describes poems that “mourn the death of nature as if it had already occurred.”35 Byron’s “Darkness” is to the post-apocalyptic genre and to us humans of a dying planet, the tip of the obelisk sticking out of a dark ocean: a paradoxical beacon – considering its title – that was planted before the end could be imagined, and therefore, that we want to imagine will be there in the end – if “nothing beside remains.”36

34In Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, poets are the archeologists of the future. Earthlings visiting the ruins of Mars resort, once again, to Lord Byron’s poetry to account for the desolation, the unimaginable sadness brought about by what is gone forever:

Nobody moved. The moon held and froze them; the wind beat slowly around them.
‘Lord Byron,’ said Jeff Spender.
‘Lord who?’ The captain turned and regarded him.
‘Lord Byron, a nineteenth-century poet. He wrote a poem a long time ago that fits this city and how the Martians must feel, if there’s anything left of them to feel. It might have been written by the last Martian poet.’
The men stood motionless, their shadows under them.
The captain said, ‘How does the poem go, Spender?’
Spender shifted, put out his hand to remember, squinted silently a moment; then remembering, his slow quiet voice repeated the words and the men listened to everything he said:

‘So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.’

The city was grey and high and motionless. The men’s faces were turned in the light.

‘For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.’37

35Bradbury turns Byron’s words into a post-apocalyptic elegy. The lines of a long-dead Romantic poet from planet Earth are resurrected by memory to help mourn a civilization that left no one to mourn it. Byron’s “Darkness” just about plays the same part for us humans on the verge of climate apocalypse. When the reading ends, Byron “leaves the world to darkness and to me.”38