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Jonah Sanders

Eng-202-701

Professor Marc Steinberg

2/15/2024

Darkness in Romantic Literature

The battle between dark and light is one intrinsic to our human existence. Among the first

inventions of humankind was fire, a rudimentary and dangerous means to beat back darkness.

Yet humanity was so desperate to be free of the terror of night that flame was worth the risk of

bodily harm. From torches to candles, we continued to wrest minutes away from night until the

invention of the lightbulb, whereupon the modernized world claimed dominion over nightfall. So

base to our nature is our opposition to dark, that human innovation has pushed against it before

we began writing our own history. Writers of works that have become pop culture see this base

instinct, as well: observe how the fantasy epic Star Wars simply labels good and evil as light and

dark, respectively. These trends from modern times fall in line with those of the romantic era and

can be observed repeatedly throughout history. With this interpretation of shadow against light

being so intrinsic to our nature, what effect does it have on the reader when these expectations

are inverted? “Darkness” by Lord Byron utilizes our understanding of darkness to their

advantage whereas others like “To Night” by Percy Shelly and “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord

Byron instead work to invert our interpretation of light and its absence. This essay intends to

investigate application of this reversal of expectations and human nature, contrast it against the

use of the expected symbolism of light, and evaluate how these literary devices are still

successful in defiance of innate suppositions about darkness.

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“To Night” by Percy Shelley gives night a form, and what a beautiful form he has given.

The poem is rife with desire, so passionate is his love of night that the dawn only brings more

longing for the darkness hours away. Each stanza ends with a short command or expression of

desire, the repetition of which gives a feeling of desperation, almost addicted to the beauty found

there. The first stanza takes a few of the expected negatives of darkness, such as the potential for

nightmares found in sleep. Rather than using this as a mark against Night, he instead uses

language like that which describes God in the bible to give reverence; while an initial analysis of

the word “terrible” might give the reader pause that Shelley has only kind things to say about his

love, the follow-up descriptor “dear” shows that he is utilizing terrible as a means to express her

awe-inspiring power. The second stanza describes an encounter the personified Night against her

sister Day, but rather an exemplification of the aspects of day that he doesn’t enjoy, Shelley

makes Night tender and kind here. Day is put to bed with kisses, and we see the beautiful strands

of the color of dusk reach out across the sky as hair brushed in front of a lover’s face. So great is

his desire that he rebuffs advances from Sleep and Death for the sake of encountering his deep

love of Night once more. Personification is the most valuable tool that Percy Shelley utilizes to

give the reader a glimpse into his unexpected love of Night as it provides a physicality that

would otherwise be impossible and allows the reader to connect their own desires and encounters

with physical love to a concept that would typically be associated with negative characteristics

like fear.

Fear is a central concept in the Byron poem “Darkness”, as the plunging of the world into

eternal shadow leads to a world in which all men live in fear and depravity. It is important here to

note the distinction Lord Byron makes between internalized spiritual darkness and the darkness

that makes up the world; though the latter served as a primary impetus for the vile actions of men
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that make up most of the text, it is not actually responsible for their wicked response to an

apocalyptic world. Physical darkness, as stated by the end of the poem, was made into the

universe itself by the actions of men, not by its inherent quality as an antithesis to light. I argue

that this distinction between these two different types of darkness is what makes each poem

analyzed here successful in spite of preexisting notions about the symbolism of darkness. Quiet,

calm and beauty are characteristic of night, and these are aspects of life that have always had

positive connotations to humankind and ergo are simple to make romantic. By conflating the two

separate aspects of darkness, the reader does themselves a great disservice and “throws the baby

out with the bathwater”, allowing the positive aspects of night from other poems to be sullied by

a distinctly separate form of spiritual darkness that is justified to the bearer by apocalyptic levels

of physical shadow, but was not born from it. Byron himself lived in a world that was permeated

with physical darkness, a seeming sign of the apocalypse in 1816 when volcanic ash blotted out

the sun for many months. Seeing as he endured physical darkness himself, and knew it was

important to make distinct from a darkness of the soul. Where Shelley gives night a

personification, instead we see that War is the beast that is given personification instead. These

things point to negative aspects of human nature being the most dangerous aspect of darkness

over the physical shadow.

Darkness has its two distinct forms, “physical” and “spiritual” made even more distinct in

Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty”. The physical darkness is so uplifted in this work that it is

as desirable as light. This symbolism would be impossible to formulate with the horrifying

spiritual darkness born out of men in “Darkness”. Instead, “She Walks in Beauty” utilizes many

tools to help the reader fully grasp his eschewing of light as a source of purely good symbolism

and serves as a primary example of the described inversion. The title of a work serves to
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emphasize the theme, and it should be noted that immediately darkness is given power with a

positive connotation by serving as a simile to the way in which the object of the poem, in this

case a beautiful woman, makes her way through the world. It is here that we see Byron meld the

positive connotation of both dark and light to express a beauty in the balance of the two, as

opposed to the previously described interpretations, which see one as purely positive and the

other as negative. The greatest breaking of expectations occurs at the end of the first stanza,

wherein the heavens are made into a gaudy symbol of what a world without a balance of

darkness would be. To have eternal paradise relegated to such a low status in the eyes of the

writer reminds the reader of the pain of looking at something that is simply too bright, so visually

loud that one must avert their eyes. To experience light in excess without the balance of darkness

is to impair the beauty of the in which she walks.

When these authors challenge our assumptions of the darkness, they ask us to look at why

we fear what is beyond the shadow. In Lord Byron’s “Darkness”, the mystery is given flesh, and

it is the darkness in the hearts of men that is meant to be feared, which gives the veil that they

hide behind its actual danger. But when the positive aspects of the dark are brought to the

forefront outside of the context of our typical expectations of what literary devices darkness

would typically be used for, we are able to more closely analyze our relationship with dark and

light without the biases imbued by the omnipresent allegory that is “the battle between dark and

light”.